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.