wound down window framed meanings
of children: our giggles, our petite
fingers and their merriment of scooping
fog into a borrowed car, far from how
those bigger boys after school jerked
a couple of albino butterflies into a winter
sunned jar, but aunt wasn’t one to
juxtapose, she wasn’t taught the
chuckles and the chirps, she signed her
disapproval to our joyous notes on
her flat face, dipped in her own puff
of silence, familiar to us, she was always
our sulking footnote.
so we went on with our fog nick thing till
a flat tyre made us jump out in a little
queue and while our adults sorted out
the car mess,
we shifted our bodies to the roadside’s
edge, dropped our heads into the veiled
atmosphere to make out tops and ends
of lush greens, our sight-seeing interrupted
by aunt roaring her cry towards us, pushing,
packing our little masses into our half
-fixed car, with her awkward quick, flapping
hands in rhythm with lines her mouth kept
striking
“be careful, those fog-
monsters, their spectres, their thrill is to
pluck children, to phantom them.”
aunt’s swift tongue was shaping her into
an anti-hero, we jerked at her rod-arm
crossing over our bullied bodies to
wind up the window, turning us into giant
skinny butterflies shut in a borrowed car.
we wheeled till uncle and driver got reluctant by
a roadkill. the still thing looked like curled
clay, pink blood spotting it like roses
over a little grave, it made us quiet
as a prayer, ending
our little kidnapping mood, but not
the air, uncle sped like in a chase, like
our tyres killed that rural dog,
like the fog thought it was its kinder,
it grew thicker like an avenger. aunt barked,
“for Jesus’s sake, it’s a half-fixed borrowed car!”
she plucked the cross, down fell the beads of rosary
worn by car’s mirror, not to her bother, she leaned back stiff,
like an awkward tomb, till we finally hacked into the clearer arterial
course, where we heard hints of her familiar place,
uncle knew to let aunt out, her clogged
spirit turned wind, fading her into water
colour, into her daughter Susan
two years dead by the waterfalls.