Salad Anniversary by Machi Tawara

Machi Tawara's first book of fifteen poems, Salad Anniversary was first published in 1987 in Japan where, remarkably for a poetry book, it sold over two million copies. In this slim, but delightful volume, she combines the classical ‘tanka’ Japanese form of short poetry, consisting of 30 tone syllables in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern) to document a doomed love affair.

The poetry is sensuously beautiful, yet pared down, the language deceptively simple, yet talking in unsentimental tones about the beginning and the ending of love.

In August Morning the narrator is with her lover: “You and I on a night beach face to face in silence – a sparkler softy sputters. /Breaking your hesitation, I watch you hunt for words to break the silence/Your left hand/exploring my fingers one by one – maybe this is love.” Or is it? Later on in the same poem, the narrator says simply: “Now that I wait for you no more, sunny Saturdays and rainy Tuesdays are all the same to me.” 

Longing suffuses these poems, moments are briefly captured as in the title poem Salad Anniversary: “Folding towels,/I wrap the smell of the sun – /perhaps one day I too shall be a mother.”

The love affair continues in Baseball Game, but the signs are there: “You have your future, I mine, and so we take no snapshots”, and later in the same poem, “Cooking an omelette/flavoured with tears/of coming morning and farewell.”

This achingly beautiful set of poems is accompanied by an afterward by the translator Juliet Winters Carpenter. Highly recommended.  

 .  

Wear Red, Play Dead

The invite said: Wear red, play dead,
Put your head in a gilded cage.
Come as your favourite rock star.
Wear black, change your name,
Buy a dress made of safety pins.
Come as your favourite Disney character.
Come, even, as yourself.

She stared into the mirror, smoothing her face,
Angling her cheekbones in shades of naked dusk
Her hair curled out of its chignon, along her neck.
Would he be there?
Now, this time, after so long?
Would he recognise her?
Her lace-gloved hands fondled the glass stem of the wine glass.
Gently, she lifted it to her mouth.

The combination of lace, leather, thigh and bottle.
On six-inch heels she grew tall and bold.
As she stepped out of the car, her dress rode up her thighs.
Transformation was complete.

There was the taste of salt and sugar, crisps and wine.
Corks popped, gold foil curled among the trays of party food.
How have you been?
Where have you been?
Had it really been so long?
She drank, she danced, she answered questions and flirted.
The night ticked on. The new year was approaching,
And now she was spinning, flying ...

He found her there – on the soft white carpet, shoes kicked off,
Head under the table. A Mickey Mouse mask grinned next to a shoe.
Streamers draped across the table,
balloons lay plump and purple.
Where have you been?
Where, and not why.
It’s been such a long time.
I’ve missed you.
You’re so beautiful.
What was Nepal like?
Did you find yourself?

He’d found her instead in a suburban house
with an A-frame pitch.
His hand curled around her thigh,
the leather dress crinkled.
They leaned into each other,
she arched her neck against his face, the beard prickling through.
He wrapped his hand against her smooth, flat abdomen.
Again he said: I’ve missed you. 
They heard the countdown in the distance
a faint sparkle of hope entered the room they stood in.
She leaned into him, whispering now as cheers filled the night air.


Published on LitNet

Winter afternoons

Winter afternoons the pink wall is
cold grey, the sun oblique, hiding,
you can feel the chill in the
shadows of the paint.
Even the leaves look cold.

Published in New Contrast, Summer 2010

Arja Salafranca wins prestigious DALRO award for poetry

The prestigious Dalro (Drama and Lyrics Rights Organisation) Award for 2009 has gone to Arja Salafranca for her poem 'Steak' in the literary journal New Coin. Read more here

Steak

There’s a perfection in the sharp knife,
handle thick and satifying to hold.
It eases through the meat, parting it
like the Red Sea.
A thin trail of red juice eases out,
I spear the soft buttery steak
with a mushroom, add a half-moon of avocado,
a quartered tomato.
The food shatters in my mouth.

There’s something about summer nights,
the kind of nights that follow days
in a city that reeks of boiled bodies
crisping under the sun’s glare.
There’s something: the lack of breeze,
the water in the pool. gleaming bluely,
the soft murmur of traffic.

It’s an island, an oasis, the lawn jewelled green.
Candles illuminate our faces
the silver, the sparkling cutlery,
the sheer perfection of knife, fork, crystal glass,
steak, salad, speared food, shattered tastes.
At the bottom of a garden,
in the heart of Johannesburg.

Freedom

Freedom is a man with one arm,
a happy smile showing perfect white teeth,
a man who answers the phone in Maintenance with a chirp in his voice.
I am asking for my window to be raised.
After years of being shut against the noise and chaos of the city
it’s rusty and won’t budge.
But Freedom can’t help, will have to call someone.
I only have one arm, his smiling voice says.
Hurriedly, I put some levity in my voice too.
Ok, thanks, whenever.
But no-one ever comes to fix the window.

Some accident in a lift shaft, says the secretary.
He was alone in the lift, had his arm out,
the lift suddenly fell, his arm ...
Workers’ compensation.

Months later I still see Freedom walking
around the building, face still set in an endless smile,
arm still bandaged, the stump ends below the elbow.
Sometimes it dangles, the bandages crisp and white.
Sometimes he uses it rakishly, crooking into the corner of his waist,
and always that smile as he saunters around the building, helps out
where only one arm will do.


(Published on African Writing Online)

I'll always miss dreaming my dreams with you

Marianne Faithfull on YouTube takes me back.
It’s the 70s, green eye shadow colours her lids
and her blonde hair is flipped sweetly back.
Swaying gently, she’ll always miss
dreaming her dreams with you.
Saying, someday she’ll get over you.

Your birthday’s in two days.
Forty.
Did you ever think you’d reach that age?
I imagine you with two kids, a wife,
in the wintry north of Canada.

Takes me back.
The night we celebrated
your twenty-seventh in an Italian restaurant
and had carrot cake with your family after.
The only birthday of yours we celebrated together.
How many since?
I doubt you count, or know any more.

I’ll always miss dreaming my dreams with you.

(Published on African Writing Online)

You're only ten weeks old

You’re only ten weeks old,
and yet you were born
thirteen years ago,
out of the death of one relationship,
a cat was acquired. A birthday gift.
Then another. A cat unloved looking for a home.
Then you, escaping life as a feral,
reared away from your wild mother.

But I waited, how long,
thirteen years, I counted the other day.
You had your genesis then, in the break-up
with a man allergic to your kind.
What would we have done?
But we didn’t do anything, and
instead you emerged
all these years later, black and white and pink.
But you take me back.
I look at you and remember him,
the man who could not tolerate cats.
Knowing how different life would have been.
You wouldn’t be here.
I wouldn’t be wondering.
Perhaps I’d be sprouting a wedding ring,
or divorce papers.
Instead, ten weeks off, pushing into life,
two days to his birthday,
I remember your birth thirteen years ago.

(Published on African Wrting Online)

The English Cemetary

Catherine Charlotte Anne Eliza,
Graeme Hepburn,
and Henrietta Augusta,
dead, within months of each other.
Dead at two- and four- and nine-years-old,
within the dreadful year of 1851 going into 1852.
Beloved children of Patrick and Mary,
the words are still firmly chiselled, so clear and so
legible more than 150 years later
as I wonder through.
Dead and buried in the cemetery for
non-Catholics of long ago.
In times past they would have been
buried upright on the beach,
washed to sea at night, pecked by gulls,
forgotten.

Kicking through the hot Málaga morning,
trying to make sense of yet another season
in the city of my birth, I step into the
English cemetery. A quiet in the heart of this now
roaring place where they’re now digging up the earth
to make an Underground.
I feel almost peaceful.

I find the graves of the writer Gerald Brenan,
amigo de España reads the gravestone.
Friend to Spain, the words are touching,
as though Spain were reaching out,
vulnerable, wanting to be liked.

His wife, dead in 1968,
‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’,
born in Malta, Gerald Brenan dies in Málaga,
described forever more as an escritor inglés, the
English writer.

Does language always define your nationality?

I wonder too, wandering. Kicking pebbles,
the ground is hard, tough, briny, the sun and
soil do not produce a natural green lawn
in this part of the world.
An urn lies empty beside Brenan’s grave.

Joseph Bertram Griffin dies at the age of forty-eight
in Torremolinos in 1968.
It’s not just in past centuries that people die young.
This time though, instead of a deadly childhood disease,
might it have been cancer?
The grammar is odd: ‘The love of your little Zizi,
the husband you was’.

A plaque for John Bevan who dies in 1816,
too early, before the formation of this cemetery.
Geoffrey Herbert Bruno is buried here in 2000,
even now the grounds are being used.

I look at the apartment blocks,
awnings pulled down against the heat,
and the familiar washing flutters from the lines.
Do they even notice the cemetery now, a fixture,
do they subconsciously avoid it at night,
because, after all, you never know?

What will it take to become Spanish?

In the shop I use my own language again,
it spurts out like vomit.
Effortlessly and without having to think.
The woman who answers me is herself a hybrid:
an Italian American who loves and lives in Spain.

Any donations welcome.
I am the only visitor today.
I don’t want to buy expensive soaps I can’t afford.

The woman runs the American club,
and the shop in this cemetery.
Her husband was a journalist too.
He died last year.

I scurry on, join a group of Spanish women
excitedly exploring the bullring.
I look at them, a tourist to their joy.

Home? A hankering for the crisp, clipped
vowels of the language I speak.
How long does it take before you stop
rushing off to English cemeteries
trying to catch something intangible?
Before you can stop plucking at a little heart of England
gone wild,
in this bustling little city?


(First published on African Writing Online)

When I was thirty-four I dialled your number again

When I was thirty-four I dialled your number again
sitting on a curb in the Spanish village of Nerja,
in the bright afternoon sun.
But when you answered there were awkward silences.
You said you had lost your English,
and I had to wonder if it was true.
You had a wife now, and even children, I think:
it would be convenient to lose your English.
I sighed. My Spanish wasn’t up to much.
And although I understood your request for me to
remember you to my cousin, it wasn’t
enough to hold a conversation.

It felt late, so very very late, that afternoon in a village in Spain,
there was only a bar open behind me
as the siesta snored on. I
t felt very very late
as I pressed the end call button
and sighed into the autumn air.

(First published on African Writing Online)

Lone woman on a cruise

Every night now, and it’s the fifth night
of a week-long cruise down the Danube.
She sits there, a lone woman, must be eighty
if she’s a day, they say.
She drinks cocktails, watches the band,
stays right till they’ve finished their last set.
She buys them drinks in the break, and
they always sit with her.
And then, when the music starts up,
she sits alone again.
A grandmother?
Surely not, surely a grandmother wouldn’t be so devoted?
A lover? No! She’s too old. The band members too young.
A groupie? A lone, single groupie, they decide.

By day they see her, bundled up, scarf on against
the chill spring air. Escorted, one hand guiding her
always one of the young men from the band.
She doesn’t look at them staring, walks on,
averts her eyes. Is she ashamed?

Does she travel alone?

Every week, till the season’s finished, through chilly
April days right through to the end, to October’s balmy nights.
The sights, so new to them, are
part of her living room scenery now.
It’s just what she chooses to do with her summers.
The band member, a cherished great-nephew.
This year she’s dying,
fading away, cancer’s spreading.
It’s just what she chooses to do,
how she’s going to live, this one last summer.
There’s nothing more to it.

(First published on incwadi)

Dachau

The statue of starving, granite figures
grasp against the Bavarian blue sky.
I stop there, pause,
can't go on any longer,
hit delete.

Germany glides past me.
Tall, long-storied houses
line the banks of the Danube.
We drift, at night,
I imagine I live long ago,
and that I row a boat with my goods
past houses shuttered to me.

I can't look anymore.
Download, then hit delete,
usually I check, look one more time,
but not this time.

Days later, and I can't look.
I thought it had not affected me.
Walking around, taking notes for a story,
taking photos of a place that is not beautiful,
listening to a guide tell us of the horrors.
Only once, alone in the cement corridor
of the VIP prison unit did I feel
what went on here.
And I almost ran towards the light
coming from the door ajar at the end of the corridor.

Even at night, alone in a hotel room
with the TV in German for comfort
and an empty bowl of tomato soup,
I did not feel it.

Then aboard a luxury river liner,
with too much food served and prepared,
I can't look.

Months later, the words still won't come.
The article is unwritten,
there are too many words to express it.

By day you feel the long forgotten brown buildings,
long torn down,
at night, one can only imagine what you'd feel.

Churches, a synagogue line the end of it,
prayers for peace, prayers to cleanse the ground.
There's a statue, yet another, of a prisoner,
skinny in his garb of oversized coat:
'Den toten zur ehr
Den lebenden zur mahnung'
A homage to the dead,
a warning to the living.

Hit delete, once, over and over again.
The brown buildings exist.
The houses glide past.
I imagine I'm a man in another life.

(Published on Big Bridge 2009 issue)

What matters

What matters is not
whether seize is spelled correctly,
or you use an ellipsis instead of an em dash;
not whether you used 500g of butter, when the recipe called for less.
Not the vendetta of the neighbour,
nor the spite of the colleague in the corridor.
What matters isn’t whether you wear horizontal stripes instead of vertical,
or the wrong colour camisole beneath your jersey.
What matters isn’t the power plays, the corporate games,
the stalled computer and the dropped connection,
or who will be the next leader to lead the free world.
What matters is the neutral breath, the needle-like teeth,
brushingaway the layer of dust, restoring your black coat by wiping it clean
with hands or kisses.
What matters is your world, reduced to kisses,
turkey mince on a plate, fresh air, the expectation that everything will be alright,
the pure wide-eyed surrender, your rush at life.



(Published in Illuminations, USA)

Chapped heart

Nearly thirty seven,
and there’s a chapped heart on my chest,
paint peeling off the red silk-screened t-shirt.
My toe is pink and swollen from a bee-sting,
no bee in sight, just a sting left on a carpet.
A deepening of my face.
Evening implies a quickening of the pulse.
Summer nights are beautiful, I’ve discovered,
now savouring the cool air,
as though it were sweet ice-cream.
A wet rag brushes away the day’s oily accumulation.
The carpet in the bedroom needs replacing,
the colour’s all wrong
and the kitchen needs updating.

And the heart, the chapped heart,
well, it’s harder to deal with that.
Scrape a few more flaky bits off,
see the still-good t-shirt appear from beneath.
I’ve had it for over ten years now,
it’s worn well, never lost its shape or colour,
only the heart, scraping off now, chapped,
scored through,
indicates time’s passing.

(Published in Green Dragon 6)

Inside and Outside

Sitting inside I type,
analysing novels.
I learn about the secret Muslim marriage
called a sigheh, recalling seventeenth-century Persia.
There’s a psychiatrist detective hero with Parkinson’s,
a Swedish writer who died too young,
an ex-memoirist who’s astounded his critics
with his breathless first novel.
I conjure up other people’s fictional worlds,
I tell people whether to spend their money
on eight new novels.

Outside a grey bird, wrapped in a brightly coloured bathmat,
stops breathing, wing broken.
My cat, tired from the chase and capture,
eats his supper of mincemeat.
Outside his prey lays his head in his
wing, and quietly gives up the fight.

(Published in Green Dragon 6)

Joburg pix, not taken

A man, having his head shaved,
highlighted by the dusk of early evening.
All around him, gathering darkness, except his head,
this small stall, lit by phosphorescence,
haloed by a weird greenish purple light.
A flash of colour.
I drive on.

Another man, lurching across the road.
Perhaps forty, mouth already gummy,
long brown hair scraggly,
head shakes, words spill out,
but they mean nothing.
I let him pass, a smile of gratitude,
before he reverts back.

A woman, whose breasts are wide and flat,
fat bulges under her cheap beige knit.
She strolls, slatternly, slowly,
I must wait, gunning my engine.

The man who puts his hand through my window.
Takes hold of my keys: Give me money now.
No, I say, surprised. No, again. I won’t give you my keys.
Eyes darting, afraid, he runs away.
No, I carry on, although no-one can hear me.
Money in the boot, not much.
I don’t carry much these days.
Money, along with camera,
tucked away in the boot,
where they can hurt nobody.


(Published in Iodine Poetry Journal, 2009)

Nat Gutman’s Wife, Warsaw 1938

Nat Gutman’s wife
was twenty-six when this one was taken.
She stares out at the stale crusts of bread
and bits of herring that are supper tonight,
and seems unable to resign herself.
Her forehead is already deeply wrinkled,
and there are brooding shadows beneath
her eyes. She worries. Her beautiful, full lips
are closed, settling into some expression
she won’t like if she gets old.

Nat Gutman’s wife looks at the stale bread,
the bits of herring, and thinks of
how to make it stretch.
Today her child played in the street
with a bandage wrapped from jaw to skull.
Awakening at four with a toothache,
she tied a bandage around the child’s head. The child
cried with pain. There is no money for dentists,
when your husband loses his job because he’s a Jew.
The child is quiet now, waiting to eat its evening meal
when darkness has fallen.
Such are the markers of meal times
when hunger is day long.

Nat Gutman’s wife is worried,
her world narrows down to a day,
and perhaps the next, and the struggle
to feed a family.
Nat Gutman’s wife’s has lost her name
in the photographer’s memory.
A woman who lives while the photograph lives.

She has a name, Nat Gutman’s wife,
it’s hiding there, just beneath the heavy
lidded eyes and the high cheekbones.
Just beyond the frame.

(Inspired by a photograph in Roman Vishniac’s A Vanished World)

Published in Fidelities XII, October 2005

Wear red, play dead

The invite said: Wear red, play dead,
Put your head in a gilded cage.
Come as your favourite rock star.
Wear black, change your name,
buy a dress made of safety pins.
Come as your favourite Disney character.
Come, even, as yourself.

She stared into the mirror, smoothing her face,
Angling her cheekbones in shades of naked dusk
Her hair curled out of its chignon, along her neck.
Would he be there?
Now, this time, after so long?
Would he recognise her?
Her lace-gloved hands fondled the glass stem of the wineglass.
Gently, she lifted it to her mouth.

The combination of lace, leather, thigh and bottle.
On six-inch heels she grew tall and bold.
As she stepped out of the car, her dress rode up her thighs.
Transformation was complete.
Ahead the lights ribboned across the garden
like snakes of desire,
Twinkling a path to the front garden.
You came! They air-kissed, she and host.

There was the taste of salt and sugar, crisps and wine.
Corks popped, gold foil curled among the trays of party food.
How have you been?
Where have you been?
Had it really been so long?
She drank, she danced, she answered questions and flirted.
The night ticked on. The new year was approaching,
And now she was spinning, flying ....

He found her there – on the soft white carpet, shoes kicked off,
Head under the table. A Mickey Mouse mask grinned next to a shoe.
Streamers draped across the table,
balloons lay plump and purple.
Where have you been?
Where, and not why.
It’s been such a long time.
I’ve missed you.
You’re so beautiful.
What was Nepal like?
Did you find yourself?

He’d found her instead in a suburban house
with an A-frame pitch.
His hand curled around her thigh,
the leather dress crinkled.
They leaned into each other,
she arched her neck against his face, the beard prickling through.
He wrapped his hand against her smooth, flat abdomen.
Again he said: I’ve missed you
They heard the countdown in the distance
a faint sparkle of hope entered the room they stood in.
She leaned into him, whispering now as cheers filled the night.

Published in Cape etc magazine, December 2007/January 2008

Pet shop in Málaga

It’s the kittens in the window
that draw us together, a grandmother with
grandchildren, and me, passing through.
We bend close, she shows the children
the fluffy animals, and we all smile together,
indulgently.
“Bonita,” I say, and the woman’s face falls,
just a fraction, it’s barely perceptible,
but now she knows. I’ve opened up my mouth,
revealed I’m an extranjera, a stranger, and she
moves away. I fooled her, perhaps, with my looks,
but the spell is broken,
I have betrayed her trust with my accent and faulty grammar.
She moves away, eyes wary now, and I’m guessing
she doesn’t even know why.

I’m one of them.

She scurries away into the night,
and I, too, move on.

Published in Green Dragon 5, 2007

Foreign ice

Frost covers the grass, the trees, the shed,
the benches in the garden.
It looks like snow.
The pavements are icy.
I crunch along, leaving footprints.
The ice melts slowly, but appears again by morning.
The sky is almost cloudless,
aeroplanes take off, trailing two
white streams as they ascend;
these curve across the sky and fade.

My boots are ten years old.
A decade ago they also walked London’s streets.
But it was different then,
it didn’t seem so blue and sunny.
I was warmer then,
was twenty, a student
in love with being a foreigner.
I was seeing it for the first time,
and nightmares came only at night.
This time the exile seems so cold
and uncomfortable.
London is strange and foreign.

This time I choke on English bread,
and can’t find the foods I am used to.
This time I tread resentfully on
foreign ice, wanting to make my flat vowels
stand out among clipped ones.
This time the weather is cold,
a bright, brittle cold.
This time I have to live here.

Exile’s icy. You will never be English.
You will never be a Londoner
rushing along the pavements at
breakneck speed to catch a train.
You will never share memories of frozen childhoods
with people who spent winters wrapped in parkas,
hands wrapped around mugs of sweet tea.
You don’t know about making snowmen,
or days when school was cancelled
because of raging snowstorms.
Instead you listen incredulously to a woman on TV
complaining that there aren’t enough types of contraceptives available.
But you come from a place where contraception is not always a given,
where bread and butter is exactly that: a meal,
something to avoid starving,
not a debate on TV among sophisticates
who have never been hungry,
and want, instead, a supermarket of contraceptives.

The ironies lie there, in the crunch
of boots, the jarring clash of
haves and have-nots,
slam up against
my amazement at the complaints when
trains are late
(aren’t they grateful they come at all?),
or that the national health system is in tatters
(aren’t they glad to have one?).

In Harrow the shopping district
has been closed off to traffic
and cinnamon pancake smells fill the air.
Familiar shops cluster along paved walkways:
Marks and Spencers, Next,
New Look, Barclays Bank.
We huddle in our jackets
at one with the crowd of shoppers,
people on leave, buying Christmas presents.
At one and yet so separate from these shoppers
with their jobs and accents,
and shared memories of English winters.
We stare from the outside,
spending pounds, handling the Queen’s face.

Harrow becomes a part of us.
I’ll remember it months later,
recreate it in dreams.
So quickly that transition from winter
to summer, only a flight away.
I’ll never be a Londoner,
I realise this as a bus takes us down
an unfamiliar street
on a cold English day.

Published in Isis X, Botsotso Publishing 2003, edited by Alan Kolski Horwitz

Carnival City, Brakpan, South Africa

Waiters in plaid shirts and cowboy hats
take our orders for hamburgers, ketchup, French fries.
At the fish restaurant there’s a queue
twenty minutes deep.
Lights flash, girls dance on the counter of the bar,
faces bared in lascivious grins. Midriffs bare.
A man gyrates on the counter,
a Stetson on his head.
Machines roll through the possibility of numbers,
apples and oranges flash among the digits.
In the smoking zone I watch, glass protected as
gamblers suck urgently on their cigarettes,
desperately clinging to something.
Tapping ash with one hand, eyes mesmerised,
focused on the flashing racing numbers.
A man in sneakers and combed-over hair stands,
bigger than the machines,
dominator of his destiny.
In two weeks time a group I’ve never heard of will
sing Afrikaans songs in the theatre.
And after that, a famous American comedian
will hold the stage.
In the sweet shop I look for liquorice All-sorts
and buy a can of Coke.
Eleven at night, there are more people coming in
than going out.
Electric heaters line the walls outside,
heating up nothing in the chill night.
I remark on this as we turn to look back,
candy-coloured turrets brighten up the black sky,
a candy floss wonderland,
we could be Anywhere, USA.

Published in New Coin 44, number 2, December 2008