Zebra Print
Gridlines project across my body
as I become part of a painting made to scale.
I bloom with tipsy sunflowers, so bright
that I forget their maker was morose.
In the gallery, the walls swirl in detail,
The artist’s large orange sun pans a cubic sky.
And it feels like being inside a story
where the pages turn imperceptibly. Words
appear on the walls, then suddenly huge insects
with transparent wings flutter and land.
These images fill the floors and the walls,
and I’m sure that my daughter is inspired by this,
this is what she’s been trying to do all her life:
draw on every conceivable surface. And
she’s inside this now, and dances a little in this
space where she belongs, covered in projected paint
and filled with music and bright colours which
clash with her faux zebra print shirt and checker
patterned shoes as bold as any artist needs
to be. She’s incapable of fading into the background.
This is her moment, and so I walk her around
the room like a debutante as she studies its features.
All summer we’ve been sitting in museum galleries
below the Diego Rivera mural, beside Japanese
tea houses and among bonsai trees. And almost
every day, she says, ‘I want to go to the museum!’
And I too keep wanting to go deeper into the
experience, right down into the dream.
Zakia Carpenter-Hall is an American writer, tutor, editor and critic living in the UK. She was a winner of Poetry London’s inaugural mentoring scheme, a London Library Emerging Writer, and a Jerwood Bursary Recipient. She has been a Poet in Residence with the Scottish Poetry Library, in partnership with Africa in Motion and the Obsidian Foundation, which resulted in her ecopoetry film ‘Human Ecologies’ (2021). She was interviewed on The Poetry Society podcast (UK) and her poetry and reviews have both been published in Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, Wild Court, Magma and elsewhere with her first review published in Poetry London and a more recent review published in Jhalak Review (an insert in The Bookseller). Zakia was a contributing editor of Poetry Wales 60.2 along with Kandace Siobhan Walker, and a part of the editorial team of Magma 82, Obsidian along with editors Nick Makoha and Gboyega Odubanjo. Her poetry pamphlet Into the Same Sound Twice (Seren, 2023) is featured among TLC’s ‘Success Stories’ and in Nicole Sealey’s selection for the ‘Sealey Challenge 2025’; the collection has also been reviewed in Buzz Mag, Gwales and The Friday Poem. She’s received poetry fellowships from Obsidian Foundation and Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. In addition to teaching at the Poetry School, she’s taught creative writing at Kingston University and Royal Holloway, University of London. https://www.zakiacarpenterhall.com
Zakia will be with us from March through June 2026. To find out how to submit poetry prose, word & image, filmpoems and reviews to her please check out our submissions page here.
IS&T internships run for 4 months each consecutively, and in order to go some way towards redressing the balance in publishing, will for the foreseeable future come from the Black, Asian, Latinx and others from the global majority (ethnic minority in the UK). More details are below.