The JRB presents an excerpt from Magnitude by Deborah Seddon.
Magnitude
Deborah Seddon
Dryad Press, 2025
~~~
Visitations
Sliding for cover right in front of my toes.
A snake on the night driveway.
Its long pale ribcage undulating in torchlight.
The day we bring you home from hospital,
there’s an exhausted pigeon in the kitchen,
crouched on the worn formica tile next to the red pedal-bin,
identification bracelet clasped to one clawed foot.
I hide her in the leafy flowerbed with a bowl of honey water.
She’s lost, let her rest, drink.
She’ll die where she is, or recover her strength to fly.
The mortuary men will not let me watch
while they lift you from the bed to wheel you from the house.
It is distressing for the family, they advise.
They stand beside their trolley, terrified
of something in me that threatens to cry out.
Like a beast, like a strange, unknowable bird.
Like the night jar who threatened your dreams.
So I am sitting on the back kitchen steps with a cup of tea,
when the black beetle flies up the passage,
claps me on my shoulder, pats me on the head.
Disappearing with a whir into the bright blue hands of the air.
You are shedding your skin.
You are trying to get home—
be ye therefore wise as serpents,
and harmless as doves.
Your last night on earth, a gogga comes in through the window,
I think he is a flying ant until we raise our heads to watch
those glorious blue wings tap dance on the ceiling.
Dragonflies don’t fly at night.
Here is my father in his glittering blue coat—
come to Fred and Ginger you up the silver staircase
to the moon.
~~~
Blueberries
This little box of blue
in the supermarket fridge
is a miniature scrap of my flag.
PRODUCE OF ZIMBABWE, it declares.
I hold the clear plastic box to my chest.
Stand staring into the fridge
until my shoulders stop heaving.
I take two.
Sit at my kitchen table
and eat an entire bowl straight off.
Bite down into the red soil and rain
of my homeland. Think of the hands that picked them.
People who watered and pruned,
working rows of saplings for two whole years
before pale green bushes bore fruit in the sun.
I know this taste. Nhimbe Fresh.
These grow on Edwin Moyo’s farm near Marondera.
These are the OZblu. The largest
sweetest variety in the world. Flown out in cold storage
to markets in Europe and South Africa,
long before the harvest can begin elsewhere.
Why do I care so much?
Nations are stories. Colonial fictions.
Farms are farms. Workers are workers.
They face the same privations the world over.
But I do.
This farmer has recovered. This farmer is exporting!
He’s partnering with small-scale growers again.
He offers training and a clinic.
Has plans for tobacco and peas,
stone-fruit and raspberries.
This farmer has risen from the ruin
of his farm, Kondozi. His workers
beaten, evicted at gun point.
The tears come again
as I bite down deep into the blue-black sadness,
taste the dark bittersweet of the diaspora blues.
~~~
One Hundred Lesbians
—after Wisława Szymborska
When was I last with one hundred lesbians?
One hundred women who love women?
Jozi Pride, 2011.
High as a balloon on E and leaping
for the sky at Zoo Lake.
Lira womans onto the stage
and sings us ‘Pata Pata’.
Everyone whoops and stamps.
We leap on the flat dry grass.
One hundred lesbians? More.
Queer women everywhere.
It’s as queer as the eye can see.
The shirtless firemen on their float.
The BDSM peeps with their studs and whips.
The thin old white guy who
joins our table in the sun
doesn’t say a word.
When we say hello,
he holds up a cardboard sign
that reads ‘Born this Way’
and smiles without his teeth.
Me in my new blue jeans
and the dark brown t-shirt
that was a gift from a friend:
Dip me in chocolate and
throw me to the lesbians.
Brand new. Freshly hatched.
38 and never been kissed
—by a girl.
(No. There was that one time,
that truth-or-dare game, that undergrad party.
It made me so afraid of myself.)
But here I am at last in my
new blue jeans and my new
chocolate shirt standing in
the queue for the portaloo in
my shweshwe hat.
And a beautiful girl with wide
dark eyes asks me if this is the queue.
When I reply, she smiles and says
Oh you’re so cute! Can I give you a kiss?
When I say yes, she kisses each of my cheeks.
Then another girl says, Oh me too please.
Suddenly here they are.
Women putting their arms around me.
Oh all the lovely beaming and kissing!
Alone in the portaloo, I can
hardly stand. I look at myself
in the tiny square of mirror
hooked over the basin
on the blue plastic wall.
My face is covered in lipstick.
Kisses in pink, in red, in brown
and purple and green. The pupils
of my eyes are enormous.
I took a selfie of the new
me in a portaloo
at ten past three.
My pupils wide with Ecstasy.
38 and just covered in kiss.
Tell me, who could have pictured this?
So let’s take one hundred lesbians.
Those who knew from very young
they were, somehow, different?
Seventy-eight.
Those who knew exactly who they were as children
and became gold star lesbians?
Fifteen, maybe. (Statistics here will depend on the letter
of their generation.)
Those who were tomboys and different from the other girls
but went on to marry a man and have children?
Fifty-eight (maybe more).
Those who never considered themselves queer but one day,
to their surprise, found themselves in love with a friend?
Thirty-two.
Those who came out to their families, to be accepted
and loved without questions asked?
Two.
Those who were bullied by parents, peers and teachers?
Ninety-eight.
Those who have been raped, harassed or assaulted
because they are lesbians?
Fifty-six.
Those who have been raped, harassed or assaulted
because they are women?
Eighty-four.
Those who have been with more than one man and wonder
if they are permitted to embrace the name of ‘lesbian’?
Seventy-seven.
Those who embrace ‘queer’ as a better term for themselves?
Sixty-three.
Those who sometimes wish they weren’t queer?
Thirty-five
Those who feel being queer is the best thing in the world?
Forty-two.
Those who beat themselves up for leaving
it all so goddamn late?
Eighty-nine.
Those who decide to transition to somewhere non-binary or fluid?
Twenty-one.
Those who live with self-hatred that surfaces without warning?
Ninety-eight.
Those for whom it sometimes surfaces, what they really want,
but who’ve decided it’s either too late or too difficult to come out?
Thirty-four.
You cannot take one hundred lesbians and tell their stories in
numbers. All models are subjective.
Besides, I’m a poet, not a mathematician.
At one point, we all might have been any of these women.
Except (of course)
those lucky two.
~~~
- Deborah Seddon was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, emigrating to South Africa where she now lives and works. She is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University. Deborah holds an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University and a PhD in English from Cambridge University. During her career as an academic, she has contributed essays, book chapters, articles and reviews to a wide variety of academic publications. Her poetry has been published in various journals, both locally and abroad, including Ons Klyntji, Botsotso, New Contrast, the Sol Plaatje European Union Anthology, the AvBob Poetry Project, the Badilisha Poetry X-Change Archive of Pan-African poets, the Gerald Kraak Anthology and Sinister Wisdom. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award and the New Contrast National Poetry Prize. Magnitude is her debut poetry collection.
