by Fathima Zahra | Nov 27, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Lesson A cell, an upright piano. Sentence, one hour. I’ve never shown any interest in music, never tapped out thumps on the dining table, stamped out beats in my scrappy shoes or hummed silly tunes. The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a...
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...
