The Alleynian 705 2017

LITERARY

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Forgetting you.

Sister, I see you everywhere

Sister, Bantuh ezifana Bantu , we are one in the same, see My glory is your glory. In moonlight, we are both tinged a dark sky blue In sunlight, we both shimmer, languid sepia pools, coated.

I see you at the savannahs Your pendants and charms,

clinking and clinking on the shrub smothered breeze. Your impregnated symbols made hollow by blunt hands are bought blindly by foreigners, Eager, they crystallise moments with your essence through photo

Sister,

SE17 Summers

SE17 like being shaken awake by loud Latin jazz and off beat stomps, As the man in the flat above swings intoxicated into this day and the next. SE17 like the sweltering summer holidays where I ran bare chested In the local park, Half of an orange Mr Freeze clenched in my sweaty palm I stop for a moment, kneeling to observe a new orange daisy, its stem growing kinked and gnarled through rigid concrete, Yet the flower still raised toward the heavens. I see a deflated juice box kicked my way, Now 8 year old me took it as a challenge so I turned, ready, To see another boy, an orange Mr Freeze held up by him like a trophy as he smiled, I held mine up too and smiled just as bright. SE17 like spotting the new girl at the park and thinking She looks like she’s been dipped in sunflower petals. Then she comes close and I note her onyx skin and almond eyes, I pause for a second, like I’ve been caught in the snare of a dying star. Then I run, cackling wildly on the west wind, my feet barely grazing the tarmac. SE17 like being immersed in worlds under heavy blankets Hiding from the boogeyman in tales of bravery and death and love Savouring each morsel of delectable syntax like a glutton. SE17 like moving limbs feral, free of fatigue, when azonto dance was the movement.

See I can’t dance but sometimes a melody is like a bud in the soul, madly growing into an oscillating flower. SE17 like staring intensely into a starless sky, creating stellar sketches of limitless futures. In one I mastered the oceans, twirling with the forgotten Atlanteans, in another I languidly swim through pulsars and neon star matter. In the most vivid the park’s orange daisy whispers me secrets. SE17 like the fissured slab of pavement bathed in fat drops of our young blood in summer, indifferent. Like living in my brother’s chalk outline, because it’s mine too. Like the fissure smile of a father reluctant to answer questions on the scar tissue zigzagging his chest. SE17 like staring in mum’s hazy eyes as she lies, there, and I’m just hoping hugs can heal an ailment I can’t understand. Hoping hugs and a clenched hand are the cure because that’s all I have. I ran into that boy from SE17 again His eyes, changed now, completely black, black hole black, like a man who’s known only ghosts and no hope He says ‘We’re brothers because we were born from the same tower-block womb’ I show him my tongue, show him it’s still stained orange, like a lazy sun gleaming of cocoa butter foreheads. He smiles, his teeth lathered in gold.

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