New Poetry by Abigail George

Stepping into a winter sun while the spaghetti sauce cooks

People will always talk. Learn to forgive. Life
is hard. It rains, even in summer it rains. Questioning
life is complex. Her identity was like a calm
breakthrough. Apollo of Africa take note of
the human life of our fallen struggle heroes, of the
wasted potential of liberation, the political
way. The shine of the afternoon has its own
tapestry. I think of Mishka and her husband
in Paris. I think of making love in Paris. I think
of Sylvia Plath in Paris with her beau on her
arm. I'm alone again. I'm on my own again. I'm
the Outsider in this vast unknown, undoing Max,
haunting ghost in a summer wonderland, and
I want to move away from this place where I don't
quite belong. This place of hurt, of pain, of
an eternity of suffering. This place where people
like Julian, and Michael do not love me. Go back,
my soul whispers to me. Years of silence
have followed me from swampland to city filled
with blood, and water, and marrow, and land
and sea. All I wanted you to say was that you
loved me. All I wanted was to survive, find the
exit out, make plans to marry you. All I wanted
was for you to save me, call me sweetheart, call
me darling, have a honey child, a breathing lesson,
but in this age of painting fruit in a bowl, and
baking sweet potato you found another girl,
while I was drinking tea, and thinking of Sylvia
Plath and Ted Hughes. While I was thinking of
Bessie Head, and a man called Max, another man
who did not love me. Another man who did not
care if I lived or lived on in death. Call me by my name.
Call me a parenthesis, call me girl, or virgin, call
me ex-lover. I desire to be bone-thin again. I can't
get this stain out, Can't get the stink out. It has been
there for days. Suffering begins with her. The
woman I call Mother. I eat peaches from the
can hungrily, she's the ghost from a childhood
view, star-my-eye to the telescope. In Mother's
world I was a stranger. Nobody loves me. The
sea meets the world in her brown eyes, the drawing
of a map, matter is only conjured-up myth. Don't
look at me. Look at my heart picking up the pieces.
I went up a hill, and came down a mountain. Mikale
understands, but he loves another. I am always
letting them go, talking about my generation, about
King and country, about surrendering lovers to the
stars, to Updike, Rilke, Hemingway. There is ice

in my veins now. There is the dream of fields, the
perspective of snow, of adrenaline, the hardiness
of years spent in therapy, and everything is fragile
here. Mother is ominous. And I am the future glory of
woman, an illustration of marriage, silence dances
on my fingertips. Everyone ignores my cries for help.
I don't know how to love, how to translate lovemaking.
Spoonfuls of sugar, a show of dust in the desert,
flesh, dawn, stain. I look for you, but you're no longer
there. You're dead to me, but not to another. Here's
a waterfall, a shroud to cover up their laughter. Flux
is flexing his muscles through the night as he loves
another. They laugh at me, they laugh at me. Mother
takes me by the hand, pushes me into the sea. Watches
all of my sin drown into the channel, watches me
not ever coming up again. This makes her happy. I'm
epic. I'm legend. I'm finally loved. The sea loves me.


- Abigail George 2019

Abigail George is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated writer. She is the author of eight books, recipient of two National Arts Council grants, one from the Centre of the Book, and another from ECPACC. She briefly studied film at the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg. She is the poetry editor for African Writer, editor at Mwanaka Media and Publishing, and she has two chapbooks ("Of Bloom and Smoke" and "The Anatomy of Melancholy") forthcoming from MMAP and Praxis Magazine. Her latest book is "The Scholarship Girl" which is available from African Books Collective in the UK and Amazon in the States.