it slips down your throat
making home inside your chest
you cannot cough it up
it rushes from you
when you reach for it
you can only wait
you get up one day
and find this rock on it
your breath seeps out
you cannot move it
or step around it
you do not know the weight
Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow Zoom launch of The Only Magic We Know: Selected Modjaji Poems 2004-2020 on 31 March 2022
Phelelani Makhanya There is a little yellow house at the corner of the street, where the jacaranda has painted the paving purple. Every morning the house appears with a new face. Its walls look untouc
Basil du Toit The rude vegetables are up to no good again, succumbing to irresistible inflations, their growth-tips, tautly congested, full of pregnant suggestion and promise; mutating buds, tinglingl
Ari Sitas After a day of stoning and gas an ancient chore beckons by the ocean’s lip - a crowd heaving, heaving, sifting through the sand for coins A happy bulldozer resting after eating up another ro