Katjiepiering

Milk-sweet little bloom,

kitten-saucer for pollinating beasts;

they spill you around the farmhouse

to ward off adders coiling in the garden.

You, little vermin gatekeeper,

waxy jasmine cat of Morpheus.

At night the moon-tears pearl

from your poison-flower lips,

ushering the grower into lush and glossy dreams,

shepherding the gardener toward Paradise,

where the executioner will hook his creamy flesh,

fork his pulpy viscera to dangle and swing

on the pickets of the butcher bird,

who perches beneath your ivory buds,

who nips from fragrant velvet salvers

below the tangled undergrowth.

You, little midnight porter,

my feline floweret of death.

*Katjiepiering is the Afrikaans name for Cape Jasmin, and its literal translation is “kitten saucer.”

Les Fauves

Above a threshold hover mirror tides

in rolling want, the anima and animus;

dark and dark we both verse on sides of skin,

impelled in brute-brushed impulsed ink —

poems beached on sloping flesh and shores;

on mine or yours, we count the gravitas

of lines libidinous on pale scapes of land,

luminous in snaking Aegean indigo

that stains in sweetness where we lay

heavy, milk-swathed in river sheets,

a curving hull moored in the bay of your thigh,

and when I turn, you bend into the swell and rise,

your hand the bow on violin hip,

first and index coil and loop

along the lumbar spine, thumbing

plender gap to collar bone — mine or yours;

a hundred motions edged and bled in waves

and sighs — our wildly longing ghosts

pawing animal prayers

that run ashore between bedposts.

Lize du Toit is a South African artist and emerging poet residing in Australia. Her creative interests pivot on melancholia as part of a larger inquiry into identity, the psychology of landscape, and suburbia as transgressive space. Lize holds a master’s degree in art and visual studies but works as an editor by day to fund her nocturnal inroads into art and writing.