POETRY Zanele Chisholm
GRAPHIC DESIGN Samantha Cass
Tell me of our mother
And of how we had once been her sisters
Lay distilled and suspended
In our grandmother’s womb,
Tell me of her screams
Do you find God to be bizarre?
In the way his breath creaks like
A forest in comatose
Like a hustler’s bleeding belly,
Gunshot charcoal hailing the almighty
Through the psalm of burning wind
Do you dream of our father?
Of his lips, barb-wired
Do you grapple with the stench
Our mother’s consent
From which we bloom
If you were a flower, would you be ilanga
Your face pickled with brown stumps slathered
into the circular motion
of cyclical rage,
subdued,
The river leaking,
they are,
of a fury eclipsed in your poetry
The trembling of our dialect
quaking in patois
Slumbered in a decimated tongue,
That of our mother’s mother’s mother
Can you not hear the sea?
Thick and burdened with the flesh of our ancestors
Were you born enraged?
Black Woman,
Were you born dying?
