Three from Carapace Number 75

EDITORIAL

We had one response to Carapace Competition No 11 fromMervyn Dendy. He was 100% correct and wins a R200 booktoken from Clarke’s Bookshop. Here is his answer: ‘The maximis “Ockhams’s razor”: Entities should not be multipliedunnecessarily.’

We are always pleased to hear from readers – we don’t always acknowledge but this note from Brian Walter is music to our conch-like ears:

Autumn
 
Oozing new
from the snailpress,
vintage molluscadel

If you have friends that you think may enjoy Carapace, as I hope you do, please let them know that if they send their name and postal address to ferg@webafrica.org.za we will send a sample of the magazine so that they can decide on whether or not to subscribe.

Gus Ferguson

Cover graphic by Lynne Stuart

Contributors to Carapace issue 75

Mike Alfred, Mangaliso W Buzani, Yvette Christiansë, Stephen Coan, Sumeera Dawood, Nigel Fogg, Genna Gardini, Gregory Gilbert Gumbs, Rosemund Handler, Geoffrey Haresnape, Anne Isaak, Katharine Kilalea, Moira Lovell, Robin Mala, Sabelo Mgogosh, Tom Pow, Arja Salafranca, Walter Saunders, Damian Shaw, John Simon, Gordon Stuart, Elizabeth Trew, Brian Walter, Adam Wiedewitsch, Grace Winkler

Three from Carapace 75 (plus a letter to the editor)

Photos

for C

In our flat, with all its fittings,
loving is sistered to the futon.

You watched me take photos of your buzzard,
your girlfriend, all haw-head and coffee,
razoring Robbie.

That clean and squashcourt smell of bandaging,
fingers taking retribution from the spine, bed and tenant,
clothes catching at an elbow of something
arid-

You gather over the top of your cup, beautiful,
little albumen pearl, strained through knees.

– Genna Gardini

*

Heartbeat

Dawn is a flock of doves rising from a plaza in twos and threes
to squat on a ledge above the muck and pedestrian tide . . . he
opens his eyes to seek the square of light, his window – an old
trick that should save him from old architecture and the heart’s
poor plumbing drip, drip, drip of longing for things he barely
recognises, old man that he is, old man, muttering a language of
old days and old days that keep time with his heart in the light
so early it barely breaks the dew’s crust or wakes birds here,
where the world is real and splashing with the smell of his island
on the morning’s cold ocean.

– Yvette Christiansë

*

His birthday

Rain pours. Sunday eve.
It thunders.
There’s a big table of people,
a waiter brings them birthday cake.

The couple eat fish.
She has a feeling it will be the last time
they celebrate like this.

There’s no cake, no candle,
simply rivers of water outside,
and the years they have known each other.

He has filter coffee for dessert,
she a red cappuccino.
She takes a doggy bag home, as always.

A decade is drawing to a close.

– Arja Salafranca

*

Letter to the editor

The Internet continues to amaze. Look what turned up on my screen:

Urban Dictionary:
snail press – 1 definition – When a male forcefully pushes his genitalia onto a wet window, in full view of others.

– Robin Malan