Journal

For you I would be insane and lovely
at the same time

–for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee, with love

Here’s looking at you at fifty. You’re
‌   fifty still living in your parents’ house.
‌   You’re not happy. You’re living in the
‌   shade of your sister’s happiness. She
‌‌   left you years ago, ventured out into
‌   the world on her own. You still think
‌   you’ll get better in therapy. You still
‌   hate your own face, and sharp objects.
‌   Steak knives with their cool, clean, pure-
‌   serrated edges. Masters of none-and-
everything. Masters of Jericho, Ruth. Boaz.
‌   The dreams you once had, you dream of
‌   them still. They’re like paper flowers.

‌   And your voice is like the agreements
‌   between them. Full of secrets, a fading
‌   sunlight of day paying attention to the
‌   resonant branches and their tensing
‌   melody. You think back to all the hurt,
‌   despondency, useless slipping-away-
‌   from-you-frustration, (honest), and it
‌   moves inside of you like the first man
‌   who molested you. You go under the sea,
‌   and become pure again (an innocent).
‌   Your hair dark lines, and haywire all
‌   over your face. The road home all-pepper-
‌   and-potholes. You’re still scared of

‌   the dark. Yes, yes, you’re still scared of
‌   the dark. And you’re all feminine-and-
masculine (girl with her hair cut like a boy). Still
‌   you long for the safe truth of women.
‌   What did you do with the angels I gave
you. I think of the coconut oil on my mother’s
‌   hands as she combed and braided my hair
‌   when I was a little girl. There’s a little
‌   girl in the advertisement I’m watching
‌   on television. It’s about hair. It’s about
‌   hair. It’s about hair. African hair, whatever
‌   that means. Oil, sheen, relaxer cream, and I’m looking
‌   at the Portuguese man again who gave
me the eye in Johannesburg all those years ago.

‌   I think about his smile that lit up my face,
his light-blue sweater as he leaned over
‌   the counter, and I think of the hair on his

‌   hands, his arms, the hair on his chest there
sticking out like a triangle. I think of his
‌   European-lover-face, and how I went up in

‌   smoke that day. How sexy he made me
feel, how beautiful, and desired, this Captain Fantastic
‌   in the paradise that was Johannesburg then.

 

Pushcart Prize nominated Abigail George is a South African blogger, essayist, poet and short story writer. Recipient of grants from the NAC, the Centre for the Book and ECPACC, her work is forthcoming across Africa in Africanwriter.com, Bakwa, Jalada, New Coin, New Contrast, the New Ink Review, and Nthanda Review.

you said you dreamed you had a sister

—how did you know

it was a long time ago
before I dreamed you 

like an echo in the cells
dim gills nub-fingers

the way the dolphin locates krill
the she cells shed
in amniotic spill

a reflection—nerve, bone, clenched
cartilage scooting backward
dragged into the basin like a cradle
sometimes the basin’s a cradle

—how did you guess
a tiny fist
raw-red
in the trauma of
the jelly/in the tempest of
the stem/in the sinew of
the grey umbilical 

a memory
in saline’s solution

a long time ago
when the body’s not your own 

the drug they gave me to forget 

 

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin (2018), the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra, and Pentimento.

Omission

Their clothes – still packed in drawers:
primrose on damson, lavender on peach,
‌           and the tiny box
‌                  for the loss of milk teeth.

Their stories – incomplete,
leaving empty pages in albums
           arranged in tiers on bookshelf
                    on silent afternoons.

Their games and toys – all stored away.
Just one coat on a hook in the hall,
‌          carpet missing the mud and muddle
‌                   of after-school debris.

Mid-morning simply brings
plain cornflakes and toast,
‌         black coffee and pills,
‌                    and no need to hurry.

 

Janina Aza Karpinska, Artist-Poet, earned an M.A. in Creative Writing & Personal Development, Sussex University, England, soon after which she won 1^st Prize in The Cannon Poets Competition. With work in several anthologies and magazines, she is particularly pleased to be included in the ‘Poems in the Waiting Room’ project. She has run writing workshops at the tax office; in launderettes; pet stores; tattoo parlours and an ‘adult boutique’. Karpinska lives on the coast in Hove, south of England.

in the pre-Raphaelite days,

they ground up Egyptian mummies and made them into paint
a deep burnt umber from white pitch, myrrh, a little pharaoh,
all the browns you could create, for lumber, or sparrows, or wheelbarrows,
touched with the marrow of decay.
in the Edwardian days, the practice was delayed
no more mummy browns, no more mummies could be found
but every museum has a wing where dead kings hang by a string,
mixed into the colors of saints and sinners and lovers,
waters deep, fires blazing, with dust there was no use in wasting
and who could hate a hand that looked at a person and saw a painting.

 

Moth Snowstorms

Uncle Gordon and Aunt Mary waving
in our rearview mirror. Dad now hours
behind the wheel. Mom up front

while my brother and I share leg space
in the back. We shut our books, surrender
to the twilight-magnified sky, the muggy summer air.

When the curve of earth vanishes
and the nightfall ceilings us, predictably
they arrive—the scale-winged insects

drawn to light like humans to love.
A bump, bump against the beam
of headlights. Then splat, splat

against the barrier of windshield,
and as if a sudden storm,
the moths are like snowflakes in a blizzard.

White and gray gauzy wings spiral
from their thumb-sized bodies.
They churn in the air as our speeding car

splices the darkness with a harsh
wash of manmade light. An unforgiving hurling.
An assault.

What is now a mural of moths,
likely thousands, like protons,
lurch and throttle until a mash

shuts out the light.
My father slows to the side of the road.
A rag ready under the seat, he steps out

to clean glass surfaces, crusted
with broken limbs, mouthparts, and underwings.
With each forceful swipe, the lights

break brighter, shining in the moth-cluttered
distance behind him, haunting the night.
They’re wretches akin to rust, my mother says.

They’ll eat your clothes, even your books.
And, all at once, I am startled by my sadness,
at their price of existence,

drawn to what extinguishes them.
Now, after just two generations,
moth snowstorms are gone.

 

Yvonne Higgins Leach is the author of Another Autumn (WordTech Editions, 2014).  After earning a Master of Fine Arts from Eastern Washington University, she spent decades balancing a career in communications and public relations, raising a family, and pursuing her love of writing poetry. She is now a full-time poet splitting her time between Spokane and Vashon Island, Washington. For more information, visit yvonnehigginsleach.com