Photo by USGS on Unsplash

Listen:

Say then that I am overflowing
& nobody’s fool & did not give up

& this face secret brew of want
of difficult women & midnights shelter

a tide met in the mouth is collateral,
or inheritance, is a quarry of petrified hands

a spoon dragging the body into the bone.
Mama was a nurse so I became a writer

her cures are better than mine
but my tongue can carry our dead

falling to us from the water or
falling to us from the heavens.

& what do we call the GIRL
looking away from herself?

The tongue fearful of taking the sky
the tongue breaking in the breath,

a spook? Daughter is a mirror given
to the world as gently as bad luck

Vuyelwa Maluleke
Vuyelwa Maluleke holds an MA in creative writing from the University currently known as Rhodes. She is a multi-disciplinary artist—a performance poet, scriptwriter and actor—and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Dramatic Arts from the University of Witwatersrand. Shortlisted for the Writivism Short Story Prize (2019) and the Brunel University African Poetry Prize (2014), she is the author of the chapbook Things We Lost in the Fire. A slam champion of the Word N Sound 2015 Poetry League competition with an essay in Selves: An Afro Anthology of Creative Nonfiction (2018), Maluleke, who is the co-creator of the choreopoem No One Wants a Black Woman with a Mouth, (2016) describes her work as an attempt to archive, retell, and give names to the fugitive experience of Black girlhood and womanhood.