in memoriam

Elisa Galgut

in the first dream, you’re consumed

with illness, a caricature, the shadow

of a flightless bird, the skeleton

of a bird fossilised in stone.

in the other, you’re in the kitchen,

standing by the sink washing dishes

you’re wearing your blue night gown,

you’re ill but i am overjoyed to see you

i can feel, even in sleep, the jolt of joy,

the unexpected sight of your appearance.

in both dreams you’re alive

and i know that i’m dreaming;

i know you’ll be gone when i awake.

i’ll lose you, once again, to the daylight

my waking will kill you

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow in-person launch of The Only Magic We Know: Selected Modjaji Poems 2004-2020 on 1 March 2022

Hoekom skrik jy?

Luciano Roberts

Is jy nie vannie ghetto nie?

Hoekom skrik jy, bro?

Is jy nie van die ghetto nie?

Want

hier in die ghetto

in Gqeberha

word jy vinnig

witbene gemaak,

sonder dat jy

nog kan bêka.

Is jy nie van die ghetto nie?

Want hier

innie friendly city

word jou smile

van jou gesig

afgerob

sonder pity.

Is jy nie van die ghetto nie?

Want hier

is geen Halloween.

Welcome to the daily

Guy Fawkes show

waar die lug

en liggaams

bullets kou.

Is jy nie van die ghetto nie?

Want hier,

die violence is sad,

maar die normalisation

is vir my meer bad.

Geen flits of skrik,

miskien ʼn klein mik,

met ʼn gejaag na die scene –

mense is al gewoont

aan die skote wat blits,

soveel so

dat eendag,

toe ons winkel toe stap,

gaan ʼn cracker af

ek skrik –

die mense om my

begin lag,

hulle hettie geskrikkie –

en hulle vra my:

“Is jy nie van die ghetto nie?”

Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 18 November 2021 as one of the Helenvale poets

Ascended

An Account of a Life in One Room in One Moment

Inspired by Juan Ramirez de Lucas, Lorca’s last lover

David Schmidt

I live in a room that is crumbling away

and I try to remember his last poem hidden

somewhere in the walls as a layer of paint

bubbles up and peels off, revealing the love-bitten

wounds blistering below, telescoping me back in

time, not sure if it is the room or my memory that

is collapsing in on itself, suffocating me like a coffin

and I scream poems of dark love to no-one.

I live in a room where the rats come out in the dark

through holes in the floor and eat the bread I leave

for them on the bookshelves because they have finished

off the volumes of verse that once fed them and I have

papered over the darkness of the walls with newsprint

to ease the years and a simple table sits in the centre

under a hanging light, an Underwood typewriter on it,

that I use to tap out articles on architecture for

cultural magazines that all start with a room because

a room is always changing with so many shifting

stories concertinaed into it, even as the building

that contains the room remains the same.

I live in a room with the walls black after the fire

with the sky of night above me, the moon waned

to a sliver and on one wall I have etched in the

charcoaled paint with my finger his words

only mystery makes us live, only mystery that somehow

express my grief for I cannot explain what drove me

to rampage across the Russian steppe or why

bleeding out gladly in the snow with everything

burning down around me I found my way back.

I live in a room where I can still find small traces

of him, a strand of his long black hair in the dust

under the bed or a clipping of a fingernail caught

between carpet and wall and I have painted the walls

blood red to represent my family’s shame in me

and mine in them and his blood was spilled in an

olive grove, I leave one small corner unpainted where

he had written in tiny letters even I was not supposed

to find Ay, the pain it costs me to love you as I love you!

I live in a room where he paints wild horses galloping

across the Andalusian plain on one wall, spring blossoms

against blue sky, the free air of Harlem, on another

day of the dead processions from Mexico, land of

our dreams and in the middle of the fourth wall is a

teak door from the Amazon carved with fertility icons

and my father bolts it from the outside so I cannot escape

with him to Acapulco even as we hear the banging hammers

of the steel being sharpened in the Granada armoury.

I live in a room of painted scenes from Shakespeare plays

and Spanish operas, I was born to be a performer, beautiful

and desired as a boy, ready to take the world, I draw a straight

black line tight around the room and tell my mother it signifies

my fealty to art and I lie on my bed looking up at the full moon

on hot nights with water pouring over me for the line is

the tightrope I am walking and it is there that he found me.

I live in a room in a cot with white walls under an embroidered

boy-blue blanket full of the smell of eucalyptus oil that my nanny

rubs into my chest and my father is making cooing sounds and

I look up at him, he looks like Federico until I see the brush-metal

moustache, I can hear the fountain, I understand perfectly as my

mother’s smile comes into focus and then everything is light.

Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 24 February 2022