Issue 26: Khairani Barokka
prayer for cave with rectangular light
ricochet of particles laced with waves a crochet clackety, darkness-grave
another day complains you moved alone too many times today
(and this was before a pandemic of stops and starts to graze late capital’s elbows),
and those old thoughts: if only i could turn a window into the ship that brought uwo on hajj
and if bed could be cloud and then menyublim, into another bed in jakarta,
and the walls open up into themselves as mirrored in southern hemisphere
and the shape of a kite in electric wires tells you where stalagmites are now
stalactites, the jaws of a stone home turned the green of creeping branches
there, your mother humming ‘burung camar’
Khairani Barokka is a Minang-Javanese writer and artist from Jakarta, whose work has been presented widely internationally. Her work centres disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. She was Modern Poetry in Translation's Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, and is currently Associate Artist at the UK's National Centre for Writing, Research Fellow at University of the Arts London, and UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation. Her latest book is poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches).
Copyright © 2021 by Khairani Barokka, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
