i’m linking things i’m beginning to see
the length of this organ, my dying land
all the mistakes my god has learned
they say the body is wise
in truth and in suffering
biding a time that knows no limits
i’m linking things i’m beginning to see
what became of the san people
who can tell us what happened
and the truth must be the truth
inside our bodies
the terrible words must burn.
Mxolisi Nyezwa is founder and editor of Kotaz, now in its fourteenth year.
BURLIN BARR
but the wolf tree was there and there was a place where // trophies hung: entire / bodies slung there in semi permanence // turning into everything / imaginable between a fresh body and shit and a variety // of trash; except Otis; he kept his right in front / of the house even
LARA SOLÓRZANO DAMASCENO
Nosotras, who for millennia have steered warships, /
sailing through seas made invisible. / Nosotras, who walked barefoot through valleys of stinging nettle, had our name ripped from the book of history / our biography from the scientific treatises
CORRIE WILLIAMSON
You lamented the absence of a human sound for longing, / like the loon has, like the wolf. I think of you reading / to your donkey the day he died, the passage where Odysseus / kisses the soil, how the beast moved away from you, /
stood quietly in the clover, then returned...