Photo credit: Stephen Kruso via Flickr.

 

Content Warning: This poem contains depictions of physical violence.

 

He enters her kitchen like a wind from Namibia
Pots clank in fear. Her face, a mature firm fruit,
becomes a fracture. There he stands, a rod on two legs;
She wilts, like a peach forgotten to be picked.

Her fear is shreds of plastic trapped in barbed wire,
as his anger dances in the randomness of the room.
His slap slices her cheek like frozen rain,
she flies into the air like a pencil sketch in motion.

Fear floods her floor; her walls are cold—
a twisted memory of their honeymoon warmth
Men drinking beer on the verandah outside
have slid away like syrup from hot coals,

like serpents into the next drinking corner,
as if her screams were of a wandering wolf,
as if her cries were silent like wool hiding in holes,
as if her cries were just hiccups trapped by walls,
as if she was a screaming animal trapped

in a never-ending pool of ecstacy.
She scrubs the smell of him off her dress,
gathers splattered pieces of herself from the ground,
fleeing to where the sun hides behind the mountain at dusk.

 

 

About the Writer:

Dimakatso Sedite is a South African poet and writer. Her poems have been published in New Coin, The Kalahari Review, Aerodrome, Botsotso, Hello Poetry, Poetry Café, Poetry Potion and on her blog nala4za.iblog.co.za. Her Igby Prize essay ‘Discomfort at Four Forty-Four’ was published by The Kalahari Review in 2018. She was a finalist in Poetry in McGregor Poetry Competition 2018, and won the Poetry Open Mic Keorapetse Kgositsile Tribute Competition at the 2018 Jozi Book Fair. One of her poems appears in the anthology Botsotso 18: From Private and Public Places. Her other two poems appear in the Best New African Poets 2018 Anthology. She studied poetry at South African Writers’ College and holds a Research Psychology Master’s degree (University of the Witwatersrand).