Farai Chaka is a writer from Harare, Zimbabwe. His work has been published in trampset, The Shore, Surging Tide, Ghost City Review and elsewhere. He enjoys sitcoms and anime. Find him on Instagram and X @FJChaka.
EXPERIENCED DISTANCE
—turn phone to portrait mode to view properly
On my bathroom floor, l wait for the slow hiss
of the apocalypse, curled into the ball
of what my body hollows when bent, my body mute
as my name on the mouths of those who love me
minus the language. 1 rinse the distance between
lips and white light of imagined Mecca—
Mosque washed of scabs and spirals of noise—until
1 try to think of God as all symmetry and curved [
].
The first man l saw die
was half-chewed out of a car, tongue red and running
for what none of us could sing/ seek/ see for him.
Spewed across the harshness of the tarmac, his blood
glistened like mine. Who am l to want Heaven, now? All my life
l've watched my loves from kitchens, not knowing what could break
the glass holding us. Last winter, l waited for my mother's footsteps
by the door mat white with dog's hair, not knowing [
].
During the start of my grief, my body cut from itself,
my mother's house was all coffee cups and bush lilies blooming
out of shape, my mother slipping silent between us
like a thread of silk during meals, my mother's past self
parting soil into rivulets in the garden. What stretched unfastened, then,
was not silence but a loud meaninglessness; to imagine a mother
as elapsed/ erased/ ending wave. Walking around each other in arcs at night,
l watched my father fracture the kitchen lights and, in his pain, he said [
].
1 knew that for everyone
l loved was a blank void for someone l didn't, was God's fisted hands
over clay, was distant ache, was distance, was long days knelt to life's
sharp insistence, was air, was [ ], was wildebeest carved in a field
to find violence, was future absence, was a car rolling off a cliff into noise,
then silence, then [ ]. 1 was reckless with who l held; untouched, skin
smooth like how l remembered what l forgave—wreck-less. All of my love
was fear, all of my love was beautiful like a spiralling [
].
And so, at the end, l begin
with God like everything else; half loved and landed into earth, sinking
roots into what will keep me even without knowing. After, God says,
“Begin.” 1 love a mother without knowing the desert of skin, without
knowing when/ where/ how she begins. God says, “Again.” She turns sick,
sickness like a seed, seed like a lump, lump like what grows in a field and
refuses to cede. God says, “Begin.” She leaves. God says, “Begin, again.” God,
how to?
LAKE KARIBA, 2024
The hospital bed is featherweight, the off white walls bland with calm
light. 1 was not trying to swim—l see it now, the way l let water crash
my breath and knead my skin until numb. My shape against the blue
canvas fucking up my understanding of time and space was imagined
heat. 1 let my body slip easy like that, silver flash of a fish let loose
from a spiked hook into stupor and stasis. 1 coughed so much water
on the littered beach it could have been a second dying, a buried spear
wrecking itself from my chest. But here, the ugly spaces. Here,
my mouth says nothing when l hold my love’s face. There,
she touches my arm soft; opposite of aftermath. The light outside
is an arrow poised for burst, is ordinary. This is the lie; l did not want
to die.
//
There is no sunset, simply light limping away from the sky
to let everything else remain; more shadow, more sleep. The lake
outside is a seed split open to let its oil spill. 1 am out of myself. Once,
a girl l sauntered up to haze-eyed at a party to dance with, feet
all wrong and misplaced, laughed and whispered, Know yourself. Our touch
felt like reconstruction, like catapulting off-course. My skin is foreign to me
here or there or there. 1 steady the water's rhythm with my eyes,
think of its coldness as a thirsting knife, knife to my skin, skin to allow
for blood to spew, to spray, to spill, again; to Heaven. Know yourself.
What has happened has happened like a hand flat on my back; both
intimate and threatening. The forest outside is blurred and bruised
where it begins. How to leave and still hold all of this heavy light?
//
The best part of God is His blank middle circled by antlers
and ferns, my love tells me. The best part is to curl yourself
up and fit. We go out for a walk, our bodies strung on the hope
that when we return, the light will have doused us enough to smooth
out a rift. My love says, you are here. The trees pillar the sky
and splinter crows into jagged blackness, and everything fits.
The trees stand with a cleanness so sharp it rejects me. 1 am
here. My love clambers ahead, legs spitting distance
for me to swallow. 1 move and let the near whiteness of the sun
falling on water jag my vision. This half blindness. This light
finding me in each landscape like a reflection. This moving
becoming a life of its own. The best part, my love repeats, is to curl.