Never Came
At first you crept, weeping through my sibling who swatted you away. You lunged at my parents, at alloyed genealogy while I was left to rust.
¡Duende!, impish in your flairs Puckish delight spills out of fingers, tumbling... A guitar lies flat on its back, frayed nylon snapping against skin.
Chaos encroaches slouching at a time when melancholy cannot be rushed, dancing sings like a painting not yet begun–All that’s left to do now is wait.
Suspended in olive oil Time oozes on charmed by Apollo, while Lorca cracks a grin an elegant Andalusian laughter cries out into the void: mother! father! let the Duende in!
You sit scratching at the back of wooden cupboards for days. I swallow eagerness, you leer and using hairpins Stab, Twist, Devour; my body withholds its blood yet you withdraw its shame.
Desperation breeds creativity my mother once remarked I, clawing at you in awe, you dazzle with familial suffering Unravelling sprite, I beg you on two knees Latch onto them no more!
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Thoughts on Photography
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We had saltwater hair, chocolate mouths or exhausted faces after dinner when my father would whip out the camera to try and capture the moment. Our reaction, as I expect most kids would have, was to hide our faces or complain whilst grimacing. I would never have thought that later in my life I would treasure these photos, and even encourage Dad to take pictures of us. Memory was more fragile than I had realized, pictures of my brother at three years old have now proven to be so much more worth-while than they ever were then.
My nine-year-old brain didn’t earmark these as impor-tant events and discarded them. After all, they happened nearly every day and most of the time, I found my siblings tiring, if not agonizingly annoying. Those days for me never had the potential to be nostalgic,only boring and mundane, and yet they were. Especially now that I don’t live at home anymore, the change my siblings go through is something I still want to be part of.
I still recognize the beauty in having something that cannot be captured: a fleeting feeling or a certain fall of light. I have tried to get into the
habit of making mental snapshots, making small pictures in my head of moments I knew were precious. They are beautiful, and I try to not overcrowd my head with memories, yet those that I have forgotten remain elusive, a sad reminder of something that once was important to me and is now gone. My dad’s practice of photography has therefore preserved something that I never even knew existed, despite our strategems to stop him. I never take photos, and I have recently tried to get into the habit by getting a cheap camera. It has worked on trips, but the magic of everyday moments is still something I seek to keep. That is why his pictures, though once loathed, now mean the world to me. He would never have the organisational skills to make this into a photo album, but maybe that is a task for me to embark on once my siblings have grown up to cherish these memories. They still protest most of the photos my dad takes, and I recognise myself there. But I have since changed, and think that memories are forgotten in the maze of my mind, so I take photos not to send or post, but to have, and remember them when my brain fails me.
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Anna Du Toit Christ Church Fine Arts Bookings: Instagram- @_oo0o0ooo_ Facebook- Anna Du Toit 15
Farabee Pushpita
The Devil who Came to Tea
Words by Ruth Port
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The devil is spilled on the floor like molten rust that climbs and corrodes to stain the wallpaper already muddied by my years of indecision over another intrepid venture into the flat-pack jungle of unnecessary necessities that I can boast at dinner parties-
I digress. The devil is sprawled like dying fire on my carpet, and all I can worry about is whether or not he’s going to burn through the fabric or leave a ring of decay, like a coffee mug irresponsibly placed naked, raw.
“Do you know what it feels like to die?”
He asks, and I jump. I had forgotten he was there in my dazed reverie. He doesn’t look like the devil. He looks like a man: tired, drunk, incomplete. I answer that I didn’t, but I thought that was obvious. He was in my living room, after all. Sitting on the sofa with my legs primly crossed, I felt like a therapist watching a patient dissolve into the background, teasing out whatever oblivion occupied their mind.
“It feels like boredom. The falling sensation you get when you’re on the verge of sleep that jolts you awake, blinking dust from your eyes and wondering whether the cracks of light splintering in from the loose blinds are dusk or dawn, or the wayward lighter of a lost soul using the lightning strikes of ambulance lights to guide his way Home.
But, this time, the jolt keeps happening over and over and over again, until you’re sweating and checking the sheets for signs of obsession and your heart is being squashed like a chrysalis under a slipper. It feels like boredombecause, in the sleepy haze, you realise you’ve been here before; you’ve always been here before, and the drudgery of waking up and falling asleep and inflicting and feeling is too much and not enough and that you’re not even good at it - you’re failing, not falling, and you know that no one cares about you. Outside, in the space between worlds, other people aren’t having trouble falling asleep. They’re dreaming, in another world, whilst you’re whispering to yourself in the dark, alone but not bothering to turn the light on and do anything about it.”
He stops his monologue, and the fire around him fades out like a sunset bleached and rotted; carrion breeding maggots and cooking garbage in the humidity.
“I don’t even like torturing, y’know. If you do anything for too long, you get bored. It loses meaning. You start to lose meaning, and you’re back there again in the space between sleep and awake.”
I can hear the clock ticking, and I can’t even content myself in the fact it’s a beautiful design, and that my neighbours lust over its crystal face and elegant hands.
I stand up, and make some tea.
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Words by Charlie Bowden Thérèse Coffey
We’re all taken with the reeds as Westminster bubbles up, white-hot in winter somehow, yet the stone quartet don’t quiver, take something for their trouble, a toke as they stretch out sore shoulders, no tentacles to stand on over the rubble.
We travel from twilight to twilight, the sky blighted by iconoclasts, the lucid air repentant but unable to make a fuss without being asked for a refund. Winter of our discontent, the furnace burns the rent and the frost piles high over the rest, the forest they invented and now ignore. Rooms open into endless corridors open into rooms open into snow where you collapse and they pour scalding coffee on your shoes.
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Like a glacier made of plaster, industrial, heavy duty, double glazing, does the job, no questions, no qualms when pressure is applied to the icy floor, these walls suggest nothing more.
One solemn sugar-filled square in a house of biscuit, a child’s thing, Christmassy, Decemberesque, liquorice and burlap-covered legs, these walls crunch when they crack and hiss when the icing arrives to fix it.
These walls are awash, a phantom blue made for alien consumption as if to say, this hue is for a supermarket kiosk just a bit too small for its own good. I should be moving out soon. Should. Would. Not.
Thomas Hodges-Gilbert Ruskin School of Art Untitled, mixed media
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Walls
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