ix.
23:24 pm / i was writing a poem when my world fell apart.
my mother held her head in her hands like a sacrifice on an altar that’s never beyond arm’s length.
my father stood at the edge of the road — daring fate & staring past the oncoming car driven by death.
my brothers threw themselves at the empty coffin i call my body / empty because I have given all of me to the lover i used to call mine.
my sister held my hand and spoke of heaven.
viii.
my name is a forgotten island surrounded by lies & hope for a favourable future.
my name is a tag on a body riddled by bullets made of the lashes from a koboko i have only seen with my own light brown eyes /
/ bullets wrenched from the lips of my mother.
my name is a number / it cannot be spelt.
vii.
they say war is good for business if you’re an arms dealer / they say death is good for business if you’re a coffin maker / they say sickness is good for business if you’re a doctor
i say suffering is good for business if you’re a god in search of worshippers.
vi.
in this poem — i am a child again / watching cartoons & chasing lizards into narrow cracks.
/ in this poem — i am a child again / weeping and calling out into the darkness for my mother as she sits in the living room with my father — deciding my fate and asking the gods for forgiveness as the thought of sending me away crosses her mind for the umpteenth time / in this poem — i am an adult that still feels like a child.
v.
i cradled the dying kitten in my arms and wrapped my sweatshirt around its weak body / i watched — as it turned away from me — only to convulse violently as its body started to
expunge what was left of its young & unexplored life /
cats are meant to have nine lives / but the kitten walked the path to death in nine weeks.
i left it in the sweatshirt & threw it into a canal / because to bury a body you love is to let yourself break apart in the process.
iv.
i was asked to read out my poem during a poetry festival and my legs started to shake as i stood in front of all the people i had once laughed with / my legs shook violently and my
voice started to break so much as i read — that it melted an hyphen into a full stop / and i remembered that the pigeon i saw the day before could only wrench out a bold coo —
when it made its way to land — balanced rightly in its nest /
and so i made my way to sit down with the mic in hand to start reading from the top.
and my legs stopped shaking.
and my voice was emboldened.
iii.
today i sinned / tomorrow — i will forgive myself.
ii.
the world is big enough for us to live out our lives without ever touching / but i — like the rest of us — spend most of my time reaching out and trying to grasp at bodies that never seem to hold enough form long enough for my fingers to strike gold /
i watched the gliding snake raise itself to flight on tv and wondered what it would be like to live in a world where holding hands didn’t lead somewhere /
& also what it would be like to live in a world where we don’t have to read about saving trees — on paper.
i.
it’s over / we lost.
the battle is over / the baby was born.
but the war continues / because the baby is me.
