DISPATCH FROM WARD C

                    by Sarah Lubala 

​i

On Tuesday
you wake
walk the back stairs to find a bird
half dead and thrashing
stunned by its own purpose

You count the split wing
the muffled heart—  
smallest of all seeds

ii

The corridors are the loudest
an artery of wailing
what nicks the heart
drawn tight across all things?

iii

I’ve known rage
the height of a woman
the cloying scent of relaxer
holds the strongest memory
the sweet scabbing
the hairdresser’s instructions:
‘Let me know when it starts to burn’

iv

I think often of your world
the quotidian washing
the nightly mewling of the street cat
the sun-blind luck of ordinary days

v

My old roommate had a razor blade
secreted in her bra
What had the years been to her?
She read her Bible nightly
Repeated the words:
‘burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise’

vi

There are rules
‘No hookups’
I dream of scarred fingers
and stonewashed linen
Summering at the window
How mere touch
is abundance in the lack

vii

The doctor asks if I know anything of
‘intergenerational trauma’
I think of my grandmother
thirteen and wed
the chicken coup in
red earth
the kneaded dough of girl-limbs
the clutch of a doll in one arm
a baby in the other

viii

They all want to know
what I’ll do when I’m ‘out there’
God with me: I’ll die, and I’ll return;
I’ll wound, and I’ll be wounded
I’ll swallow the white throat of fear








​

Sarah Lubala is a Congolese-born South African writer. She has been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award and The Brittle Paper Poetry Award. Her work has been published in Brittle Paper, The Missing Slate, Apogee Journal, as well as The Gerald Kraak Anthology As You Like It, Botsoso’s 2018 Poetry from Public and Private Places and the African Collective’s Best New African Poets 2018 Anthology.