(Un)veiling by Mandilakhe Yengo

A short film by Mandilakhe Yengo, starring Alude Mahali, and based on Gary Cummiskey's poem 'Corner Cafe' from the collection, Today is their Creator. The film was premiered as part of South Africa's City Breath Festival of Video Performance and Poetry.

September 11 (7) by Gary Cummiskey

Air Stewardess by Jenny Kellerman Pillay

Max Moodley: 0031

Victoria Williams: 0075

Last night on the trail of my stockings: it led right to Allen’s door, and I hesitated to open it because what do you say to someone who’s probably wearing your stockings and looking better in them than you?

But then in one moment I knew what to say, so the door opened and I spoke fast without looking:

“Allen I have a problem. Everyone knows we are really enemies pretending to be friends – now I have to go to a party with him, but it’s really a ritual gathering and everyone will look at me and be in agreement with him. They’ll all close in… It has become a conspiracy. They’re hiding all the good and light and turning me out into the alley. What can I say to them? What is the position you showed me to alleviate my symptoms?”

I open my eyes and Allen finishes pirouetting and settles in meditative repose.

“Some to his street. Great con from filled hotels. Not idiot, he’d first sometimes drive on a big afternoon. Eyebrow rocking under poolhall shoeshine moment. Young cue-fixed man, thumb unfolding, slowly last as only the truth can be.”

Then silence.

I kneel and like Mary Magdalene, remove my stockings from his holy legs and slink away, back to the night.

Paragraphs

I use pick-up paragraphs.

September 11 (6) by Gary Cummiskey

Bob by Jenny Kellerman Pillay

Max Moodley: 0030

Victoria Williams: 0074

Another strange love dream. This time at a table in the JSR restaurant. It’s too shiny, it’s too bright, it’s too sanitary and I’m really still too young for all this.

He is sitting across the way from me. We are both treating the world like a stage. I am dressed up and carrying a violin case and I’m trying to explain that I want to be happy for him but something is stopping me and I don’t know what. And he says “Already you’re lying,” and I say “I know, I know.”

I say to him that I can barely read his mind, let alone my own. Then I try and drink my cappuccino all in one, and inelegantly choke on the hot milk while his face is buried somewhere in my jacket and he tells me he can still feel my heart beating. So I move across and listen to his chest and tell him I can’t feel his.

September 11 (5) by Gary Cummiskey

Max Moodley: 0029

Victoria Williams: 0073

*Yawn* Very tiring week. I’m not going to tell you about it, But…

Considering most people probably spend an awful lot of time being secretly in love with someone, you’d think they’d be a little more understanding and considerate of me, who is never openly in love with anyone.

Besides that, yesterday I couldn’t decide whether to have gingerbread or toast for breakfast, and this is what I mean about my extremely complicated yet uneventful life.

September 11 (4) by Gary Cummiskey

Michelle Nair: 0004

Pink Eye 1

Pink Eye 2

Victoria Williams: 0072

Damn. Mass-media is selling everyone a lie. There is no easy way to make it without any talent. And it’s not going to happen the way I dreamed either. You can’t just walk through the wrong door on your way to a job interview, run into Lenin who stands at the French windows and waves his hands all over imperialist Russia and says You take it. And I think for a moment and decide that nations are like lovers, and once they are beautiful and deeply – maybe irreversibly – flawed, I must have them. Oh god, oh god…

But once again I knock on the right door and I enter and sit in front of a pin-stripe suit and two enormous sweat patches who recline and say to me This has better be important, or at the very least interesting… and This is the best thing you’ve ever written, and the worst thing I’ve ever read.

(But maybe I wake up with Siberian snow still in my hair, and ah what then…?)

September 11 (3) by Gary Cummiskey

Poetry As Intervention: Gary Cummiskey Interviews Alan Finlay

Alan Finlay lives in Johannesburg where he works as a writer, researcher and editor on issues of media freedoms and internet rights. His poems have appeared in various journals locally and abroad, and short selections of his poetry have been published by small presses. Over the years he has founded and edited a number of literary publications, including Bleksem and donga (with Paul Wessels). With Arja Salafranca he co-edited a collection of prose and poetry called glass jars among trees (Jacana, 2003). He was editor of New Coin poetry journal from 2003-2007. His latest collection of poems, pushing from the riverbank, is to be published by Dye Hard Press in October 2010.

To read the interview, click HERE.