by Fathima Zahra | Nov 26, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Skins My mother had a handbag made from the skin of a female cobra her brother killed in the garden. No rrkk-tkking Kipling mongoose to protect her, just my fierce uncle, bantamweight in a stained banyan brandishing cricket bat and torch. Rain...
by Fathima Zahra | Nov 25, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Generational Divide She only speaks to me these days through groaning floorboards in the night and slammed doors. Through eye-rolls, half-eaten dinners, and empty packets of birth control pills. Her friends and their mothers are ghosts, glimpses of them...
by Fathima Zahra | Nov 24, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Hauntings No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding despite the unearthly hours, the half-light mad sing-song routines of rocking a child back to sleep. A potent cocktail of hormones. Perfect conditions, you’d think, for a woman to slip through...
by Fathima Zahra | Nov 23, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
As the Festival Wanes I The furniture covered in once transparent now foggy sheets craft the room a morgue, and we identity the bodies, “This cupboard, my mother brought with her from her father’s place.” “This couch still...
by Fathima Zahra | Nov 22, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Burning Wings Dark but tolerable The air, itself, no longer sweating. And the yellow moths like some strange throw-away tissues used up by nature circle the lamp hanging above. Nearer and further they stitch, around and back and past me. I see one...
