Austerville Drive: Wentworth, Durban

Genus Cardinalis, emergent in new climes, sings, feeds on insects and sap. Not migratory but accustomed and partial to the warmth and hospitality of suburban environs. Backyard feeders, ample mates, males are red. Monogamous and attentive, males are also aggressors, highly territorial. Males will, if so inclined, fight their own reflections, and they do. Females, if not vigilant, may be injured in the fight. They populate above heads, not terrestrial, not completely. Watch them, their faces. Tan or gray, females sing, incubate, wait.

Colored, between Chatsworth and Umlazi, is a place like any other

I speak in my father’s place. I write, in my skin, my mother’s lasting wish.There can’t be anything more tempting, nothing worse thanhis outstretched hand emptying. Us women, Connie, Meryl, Jan and me,we went down there to paint faces on a wall, make a mural.

Once barracks, now home

I was told it’d be for visitors, for families, for the victims. Long wall,long hall: I couldn’t help but think of them, the men who’d have topass by those smiling faces on their way to the holding cells.What, who would they see? Would they even dare to look?

Police station becomes canvas

Would that paint be another face bruised in their minds?Would those faces inspire hope or mock the condemned? I worked on onefor what felt like hours until all I saw was color, until it becamea kind of stain, a mistake that needed to be fixed,

My mother left bent, bullied into a kind of disbelief in rites once thought sacred

Until she became those women looking for refuge, one of thosewomen who found themselves at the mercy of any man. She becamemy mother’s lustre, that face, and I wanted to perfect her, to make her the onethey’d never forget, the one that couldn’t fade even as they would,

Rites once thought sacred

a reminder of the freedoms they mistook for pleasure, getting caught.I didn’t see them, those faces, bright, alluring, butI can imagine the shame mistaken for guilt welling up in their eyes,crowding their throats. I imagine them, those faces, being storedlike memory, like identifying information:

name	occupation
address	marital status
phone number	children, their names and ages (if applicable)
age	known allergies
weight	victims, their names and ages (if applicable)
height	health concerns
hair color	dietary restrictions
eye color	siblings, their names and ages (if applicable)
race/ethnicity	the affronted, their faces

I imagine it more like a feeling, all that stuff stirring, freedomtested and overwrought. And I wonder where my sympathies lie.How could something so bright be so blindingly cruel?Is it cruel enough?

Colored, between Chatsworth and Umlazi, Wentworth is a place

I’m the one who’s supposed to pick up the dirty brushes and drop cloths.As I collect them I’m reminded of the mess, all that remains:stray spot of blue over there, drop of yellow here, all the shit that didn’t get covered,the loss of will, of pride, the rebuilding of homes without bitterness or red-anything.