Beg

Sestina for a domme

Maneo Mohale

Once. Once ago: I swallowed a blood-blossom

& inked myself a love dipped in revelry. Everythere

we puffed like owls, brick-backed as this new song of myself

un-harmonied & honeyed as the past.

If I gave it to you, where would you tuck my tongue?

From the maybe-vista of your pocket, teach it how to say yes

twice: teach it doubly to say please:yes

Ignore my shyness. This dance is double-blossom

spun. Does shame govern me? yes—Send your tongue

to me regardless, to be a poem. There,

let hunger be tethered as an anchor, passed

between the triptych shadows of myself

three-paned & bright. Let me sing myself

tongued into your mouth. Let every song say yes

to you. Soaked as I am in the past,

I’ve been known to write a blossom

into blood-blooming, yet everythere

in the nation of my mind, the ray of your tongue

forges me open, pens me anew. Tongued

in a new language, blood beats itself

bruised, rushing to you—delicious as wine. Words shed their

skins quickly when you talk. When you say yes

cities of doubt crumble into blossoms.

Lovelight, I’m trying to talk to you, but the past

is a gag, slick with sometimes-silence. Passed

down, hereditary. History sucks as a segue,

is not the corridor of blossoms

we were promised in school, consoling ourselves

with white pages & lunchboxes sealed in promise. Yes,

our mothers will never know us like this. There

is no country safe enough for this word—there

could never be. Who could ever defend the border of the past?

Please. Let me be a river of yes

a prayer in black tongue

an ocean of myself:

a many-bladed blossom.

Make me a tongue.

Show me myself:

flesh gated by teeth & promises—bright as blood.

Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 17 February 2022

Drawing the Dark

Kobus Moolman

Day and night, night after night,

deep in his prayer, he deliberated

whether it was possible to draw the dark

without ever looking at it.

He had his head in his hands.

His hands covered his eyes.

His breath caught on words that tasted like ash.

Day and night, night after night,

he dragged his slow feet across

the frozen lake of memory.

It was dark always, there

beneath that bright layer of appearances;

a darkness he trusted,

the way a child trusts his mother

to recognise him in the rush after the bell.

And yet now, oh,

now, after so many mistakes, so many times around

the same stale track of reaction,

he had begun to wonder whether

it could ever be possible to look, only

look into the inside of the darkness

without being turned into it.

Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 15 February 2022

Things I keep from my mother

Kerry Hammerton

When I lost my virginity, who with;

how that nice boy, the one she liked,

wasn't nice behind closed doors; and other things

I couldn't even tell my friends.

When I look at my hands

I see her ageing hands. Her drawn-in lips

remind me of her mother's aged lips –

but these are things I do not tell her.

There is much my mother doesn't know –

how many lovers I've had;

why I live so far away from home;

how often despair rises in me.

(published in Secret Keeper. Modjaji Books. 2018)

Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 10 February 2022