A flame was never meant to extinguish this abruptly. Starved of oxygen, your origami letters became ash in a mouth that bled (for too many years). I would say goodbye, but the word is a branding iron razed against a smoldering tongue.
Forgiveness never came easily for the dead. Graveyards are full of grudges and barely concealed debts. When I told you that I loved you, I disguised the words (behind shattered glass bottles and origami letters confettied like New Year’s).
I remember your eyes cold like marbles, frozen like winter ponds. (I made a half-joke and thought myself funny, but your lips never curled up in a smile.) This is autobiography, but all you ever asked for was a poem or a story (but not this – not an obituary or an elegy. Not a eulogy or a goodbye).
I could never say goodbye. I ran from endings & ripped the last page out of every book I ever read.
Sometimes, I even wrote stories that ended in the middle of a —
White knuckle it, and the pain still sears through these autumnal bones. Crumble them like my skeleton has memory. It hasn’t forgotten the calendar days piling up (as thick as novels).
It’s time to start spitting matchsticks and not caring about the consequences (the aftermath) of fire.
My ears, stuffed with cotton, muffle the sound of silent, blood-curdling screams. I have crushed tears into my palm and have screamed silently into lungs of shower stalls (yet the world still whirls as though I were flung off a carnival ride).
I wasn’t being coy when I said “no”. I was being adamant. My teeth marks in your shoulder blade should serve as a reminder.
I will punch through glass with words alone. No amount of duct tape, super glue, will repair the realms destroyed.
Memories are like binge drinking. I wake up with my throat burning. (The ghosts wail outside my house, rattling the windows and causing the rafters to shudder. Begging to be let in.)
He mistook my empty for hollow and tried to fill me when I was merely seeking fulfillment.
Another left shadows form-fitted to my figure, lying, saying I was just an angel slut falling when really, a shove sent me flying. (The truth tastes as rusty as nails and goes down just as smoothly.)
He lied to me about the taste of electricity, claiming it was a needle to a vein. And all I ever wanted was the stars to be bright enough, I never needed a neon sign again in this town.
These memories are skyscrapers, and these skyscrapers are leveled by volcanoes. (And now, I am soaring like a phoenix, above the rubble, taking me beyond the landscapes I once knew.) No longer do I care about where these matchsticks may land, nor who may scorched by the words that sear.
I remember tasting the tobacco shored in your lungs, and you had the courage to tell me my auburn hair smelled of a bonfire.
I once vowed a dress I owned would forever smell of rain and my ink-stained fingertips would fidget – restless with memories, but now, when I cradle myself to sleep, my eyes are empty.
I no longer name the silhouettes that landscape my bare walls or dance along my broken skeleton bones.
I remember when my brittle skin was scented like my favorite library, but no one picks up an abandoned tome when the ink that travels the pages is nothing more than a smudge and ashy dots.
I am an empty teacup in a house that is haunted with your name. When I reread the letters you wrote me, shards of glass glitter along voids of thought, threatening to lacerate the emptiness. To puncture the silence where memories once towered like infernos.
Carol Majola is a trained ECD educator, business management student, self proclaimed poet and author, and aspiring entrepreneur. She is passionate about community building and helping youth tackle social ills affecting them. Majola is advocate for issues such as bullying, GBV, and substance abuse. She believes that her purpose is healing and that words written or spoken are powerful to break but also heal and she found healing in poetry. To Carol, the two most powerful things are love and words.
When did you start writing poetry?
I fell in love with poetry when we were learning about the history of our country when we were in school, when whites and blacks were separated during the apartheid era. And I fell in love with how expressive the writers of the “struggle” were and how they used the art to cope with their pain and loss, to communicate their feelings more eloquently. But it was when I lost my father at the age of nine, that I wrote my first poem.
What are your favorite words?
I am a lover so my favourite word is “love”.
My name “Carol” because it means “a joyful song”. I feel it explains why I love music so much.
Do you have a particular style of poetry you write? Have you ever experimented with form poetry? What were the results?
I do not think I have a particular style of writing my poetry, although most of my poems are in a similar structure. They are more expressive than rhythmic though.
I love words and playing around with words and therefore experimenting with form poetry was inevitable. My first exposure to poetry was form and studying poetry. With my work, I feel that form gave it more structure and allowed me to experiment with my rhyme scheme. Although the consideration of my lines and stanzas made it seem limiting in how I could express in depth, it did teach me careful consideration of my word choice.
April is Global Poetry Writing Month. Who are some of your favorite poets from around the world?
One of my memorable olden day favourite poet together with the likes of Charles Causley, would be a South African Poet by the name of “KEORAPETSE WILLIAM KGOSITSILE” who was not only a poet but a social and political activist who lived in Exile in the US in 1962. I love how he encouraged interest in Africa, African poetry and the practice of poetry as a performance art. Origins and Santamaria are some of my favorite works by him.
Maya Angelou has always been my favorite, as well as Rudy Francisco. I have my recent favourites who I have experienced through social media – Yaw Osafo (KINGYAW FROM GHANA) residing in the states and Hafsat Abdullahi (HAVFY FROM NIGERIA)…such powerful young poets.
AConjugal Suicide
Floating, barely breathing beneath the waters, In a bottomless ocean. Drowning, for I sold myself at the price of trust I recklessly handed over. Sun rays cast between my fears, Water covering my stream of tears, My wails muffled in the deep, Not even those shoring at sea Can see me, nor my weeps hear. I am dazed swimming in agony, In a sea a path to which I built With brick and mortar with which I tried to build my home That now lies desolate and forgone.
Eryn lives in South Germany with their family but is originally from Oxford, UK. They work freelance as a translator and a teacher. When not writing, they’re out on their bike in the forest or dreaming up new ideas to write about. They are obsessed with vinyl, fountain pen ink, dragons and cheese. Preferably not all together. Their current favourite thing is spring blossoms against the white clouds. They are working on two new poetry collections which will be released this year, Masquerade Me and Death by Sugar, and two fiction works, a Dystopian Scifi novella called The Dust Collector and a Gothic Horror called The Black Cat Bookshop.
As a huge fan of your book, which features illuminating poetry on PTSD, I feel like I have to address that. How did you overcome your initial fears and write about a topic that is still so taboo in so many places?
I didn’t want to write something hard, or dark, and I really didn’t want to write a poetry collection that is largely autobiographical. But I found that on occasion when I shared an individual poem, that people really resonated with it. I saw that there’s a lot of poetry about anxiety and depression, but hardly anything for PTSD. And ultimately, sometimes, it is on you to begin it. It was on me to say, this is what PTSD looks like. So it became a collection. It was, and I think will remain, the most difficult collection for me to complete and publish. But I don’t regret it.
Do you sit down with a poetry idea in mind or does it slowly develop as you sit in front of the page or monitor? In other words, what is your process?
I should probably mention that I am an aphant, which means that I have no visual landscape. I cannot conjure a memory and play it back as if it is in glorious technicolour. If someone asks me to imagine a box, I cannot see the colour or texture. I see a nondescript box. So when it comes to poetry, you could say that I am a blind poet.
My visual landscape is layered with music notes and quantum physics. I hear a concept of a poem, a shiver of something, and I have to follow it through to the end. It happens a lot with a phrase, an overhead conversation, perhaps, and then I have to chase the thread to the end. I do not always know where it will turn up.
It’s cliché, but each person’s answer is uniquely their own: what is the best writing advice you have received?
Don’t lose your own poetic voice.
What are three words you would use to describe your poetry?
Lyrical Layered Whimsical
Why do you write poetry?
I have been writing poetry since I was 16, and really, have never stopped. I never intended to make something from it, I never intended to call myself a poet. I studied both poetry and playwriting at University but poetry was the one that survived the grind of assignments, of life getting in the way, and it kept coming back. I write poetry because I need to write it. It is cathartic, somehow.
Is there a common motif in your writing that you find yourself returning to?
There are a few, yes.
In Of Swans and Stars I explored the ideas of my own North Star, that place that calls you home, the direction on the compass that we follow. So swans and stars, are very important to me, and you see amber, being cast in amber, featuring often. I write a lot about Druidry, mythology and folklore. Dragons will always be in my poetry. But at the heart of it all, is always love. Love for who we are, for where we have been, and where we are going.
If you could attend a poetry writing conference taught by any author, lyricist, poet, etc., living or dead, which two to three people would you choose and why?
Larkin. I love him, I love how he writes, his raw energy. Peter Gabriel. His wordsmithery is without equal. WH Auden. I want to hear him read and see how it is reflected in his eyes. I want to see how he writes.
A thousand cranes Paper art flying For peace in the world A thousand cranes Countless painstaking Paper folds For peace in the heart A thousand cranes Flying their dance On white string For peace in the eyes A thousand cranes Quiet time Each repetition A healing caress For peace in the soul A thousand cranes Origami sorcery Peace in the world Starts with ourselves.
Isabelle Palerma 