Bloodshot Monochrome. Patience Agbabi

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      SHOTS

       SEEING RED

      1

      Black mum parts my continent of head,

      with glazed black cotton begins to wind

      each division so fiercely my mind

      bleeds black. I can’t close my eyes in bed.

      White mum uses fading navy thread,

      the tension less cruel, more kind

      but the vision colour-blind

      so I see red.

      2

      I read the instructions for shocking-red dye

      (freedom has given me the green light)

      yet bury the evidence under a head-tie

      like the insight

      that I see the world through a red eye

      where blood and heart mean more than black and white.

POSTMOD:

      a snapshot. Monochrome. A woman

      in a ’60s rayon suit. A knee-length pencil

      skirt and jacket with three-quarter sleeves.

      Hot aqua and a mod original.

      That shade translates to stylish grey. It’s me.

      And on the back, someone’s scrawled in pencil

      Brighton Beach, 1963

      for fun because I wasn’t even thought of

      in 1963. Imagine Rhyl,

      ’82, where the image was conceived

      by someone with good taste, bad handwriting

      and lack of a camera. Yet that negative,

      in our heads only, was as sharp and real

      as the suit so out of fashion it was in.

GREY AREA

      We two sip wine outside a Jo’burg café.

      Soweto’s bloody dangerous, don’t gotill it’s over she says. I don’t respond.

      A white man swaggers by with a black

      woman who’s not his wife, girlfriend or date.

      A black man curses her in Xhosa.

      Click.

      The white man pulls out a gun and

      I’m sitting so close I could lift my hand, touch metal.

      Slow motion back

      to our car. No split second.

      The beer is ice-cold in Soweto, cold as lead.

      Home is a grey area yet safe.

      I don’t want to go.

SHOOTING ‘UFO WOMAN’

      Action! Alien with Day-Glo afro

      (wig) and eyes (lens) like stained-glass window,

      mount silver stairs, float down to earth

      (down-escalator Canary Wharf),

      make earthling СКАЧАТЬ