New Poetry by Abigail George

The Rival With The Bette Davis Eyes

She’s in love. He stays over. She tells me she doesn’t have
any friends, but she has Dominic. She tells me she’s lonely,
but she’s climate change. Once you were like home, like any
sanctuary and I was safe as houses in a tsunami and then
you were gone. You wanted to live. You wanted to fall, and
you did. You did. You won’t be showing up here at my door
anymore, daughter, sister, stranger to her homeland, to her
tribe, her country, her people. I don’t believe in the sun, don’t
believe in our love like I did before, and we never talk and
when we do it is always about you, I exist too but you don’t
see me as the sea, or the thin red line through the mountain
of bone that makes up our anatomy. The man makes me so
happy. The happiest that I have ever been. He makes me want
to stand on the steps with my imperfect heart in my hand. I
want a daughter that looks like us. I want a son with his eyes.
I am tired of this sin. It is not prizewinning. I am tired of this
skin. It is not driftwood. I am tired of this sea. Tired of watching
the waves that remind me how much I could take. How limited
I am now. And I count the ways that this man loves me. He’s
become my world. The wonderland requiem of pain is just
pain beginning to lose its lustre like daylight. It is like an omen
gathering dust on the ash heap somewhere. Everyone knows
loneliness. And we have all felt amazing chemistry deep within
our goals and plans and interests. I don’t feel as if I am falling
apart anymore. I feel whole. I see the outsider for who they are.
Loneliness is just a game. Solitude is when we sabotage the
illusion of life that we see. Futility stands there ultra-composed,
telling me that there’s no going around despair and hardship
when it is all that I have ever known. I don’t know if I will die
young. I am nocturnal anyway. The man sleeps. I don’t sleep.
The man eats. I don’t eat. The man seems genuinely happy and
I am always in the pursuit of it, having known the lack of it for
so long. The flowers are shy of the sun, of the planets, of the tides,
the currency of the sea. I have to get used to you, one random
person said, but he was an important random person. You’re too
forward, said another who threw his hands up in the complex air
and walked away from me. The man is the sun. He knows all.


- © Abigail George 2020

South African Abigail George has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize ("Wash Away My Sins"), and Best of the Net award ("Secrets"). She is a blogger, editor, filmmaker, playwright, poet, essayist, chapbook, novelist, novella, grant, and short story writer. She briefly studied film at NFTS (Newtown Film and Television School) in Johannesburg. She was educated in Port Elizabeth, and Swaziland. Her latest book is "The Scholarship Girl: Life Writing". She is the poetry editor of African Writer, and an editor at Mwanaka Media and Publishing. She writes op-ed pieces for local newspapers, and is a columnist for a national travel magazine. She has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2020, "Of Smoke

and Bloom" (Mwanaka Media and Publishing), and "Anatomy of Melancholy" (Praxis).