LETHOKUHLE MSIMANG

I’ve seen the way men look at me. For a moment it’s as if they are found. Like they’ve found something rare and gentle. Like I were their only hope. But what I love is the grip of their hands around my neck, I love it when I’m overpowered. When I feel as though I have no choice and I’m moaning and they won’t stop. I wonder what it would take for him to hear me. Must I bite his ears and scratch him?Must I scream with my voice that won’t carry, until I finally have the guts not to speak?

It’s taken a while for me to arrive at this, to admit that I’m so willing to be destroyed. It contradicts my posture and my love of literature. Though I may marvel at a twig in a stream or take pre-caution with my skirt through a breeze, there is no grace in my desire. There is no art in how I love.

So before you fix your burning eyes on me or imagine my body bathed in milk, understand that I am not a gentle thing. I am intense and vulgar. I rolled in the mud as a child and I was forced to take a shower.

It doesn’t take much to know a person. A small effort would be enough. And it’s not fair to ask to be understood by someone you’ve never tried to understand. Men do this all the time, when they think that you are beautiful. They see all sorts of things, even the future, but not you.

THE OSTEOPATH

The osteopath tells me my intestines are in knots because I miss my father, because there is a hole in my heart. It has crippled the right side of my body she says, and I laugh as she speaks. She is quaint and petite, she looks like a black bird with the spirit of june.

Except I’m thinking about my lecturer, about my basketball coach, about that croaked old man with his watch and his toys. She’s wrong, I tell myself, I haven’t seen my father in years. It’s like that where I’m from, not a bone in my body aches.

-How’s your balance? she asks
-I always trip on my right foot, It’s like that in my family, my mother does the same.

She fiddles with my hip bone, with my head and my toes. When she’s done she says I stand better, that both my feet are steady on the ground. I supposed she saw my heart when she was looking at my posture. She said my back hurt from a pain in my womb, that our lives are inscribed on the surface of our minds. But does she know I killed my child, or of the time I almost died when I couldn’t see the traffic cause the sun was in my eyes. Does she know I tried to write? in a small attempt at flight, before my mentor said I ought to feel the ground beneath my feet...get a note pad, he said document concrete expressions...then write some more, and I wrote some more just as I was told.

I think his hairline was receding. I noticed that then, when I thought to rip his heart from his wife and from his child.