kw

on the southern tip of the continent,

a night in early december;

my mother walked along the narrowing coast

barefoot and slender, knuckles already swollen with age

and watched four men bend over a blackening corpse.

she says no more: i imagine her alone

toes moving in tepid water

the ghost of a child cringing in her belly,

in the slow cold seep of a dead man's bath.