Sheree Mack is launching her new Smokestack collection, Darkling, online on Thursday 7 November at 7.30pm: register here. Here are a couple of poems from the new book......

how many more black women must die in police
custody?
after Kali Nicole Gross

behind steel bars
upon concrete walls
smeared with shit & blood
a shadow swings

bed sheets
like gnarled roots
exposed
twisted around
a creaking branch
upholds old customs

justice unbalanced
by race
if she was white
she’d still be alive
.fact.

.dead.
she failed
to signal
a lane
change

Surrender into Blackness
inspired by Ayana Zaire Cotton

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held
Dionne Brand, Thirsty

The blackness will swallow you if you allow it.
A darkness so total it promises to disappear you.

You realise this is the bottom. There is nothing beneath, further
down,
or coming to save you.

You accept your fate as to fight or to frail will be futile.
With patience & care, you will find comfort in blackness.

Softing open. Making home in the ruins. In the nothing-
leftness.
You will come to see the gift of blackness.

Darkling darling, slowly as your eyes become accustomed to the
blackness
you will make out other eyes. Pairs of eyes there in the blackness
with you

To mark IWD, we're publishing this poem from a new collection by Sheree Mack called skinshame, to be published shortly by Culture Matters.‘We’ll show you you’re a woman’ was the title of a report compiled by Human Rights Watch into the violence and discrimination experienced by black lesbians and transgender men in South Africa. 

‘We'll Show You You're a Woman’
in memory of Eudy Simelane

The minute you see likeness is when you realise that no matter what you're going through in your life, you are not alone
- Zanele Muholi

a) On the outskirts of Johannesburg, she is finally cured.

b) The Namaqualand daisy is in flashy orange bloom.

c) They say Satan has a hold on her. She is a demon.

d) I am afraid to be myself.

e) In a park, on a moonless night,
they each take their turn to correct her.

f) The township always smells of Omo washing powder,
even when we have no water.

g) My mother says I must take a boyfriend.
She invites the Pastor into our home to convert me.

h) No way a finger or tongue can satisfy you, he says.
You need one of these to sort you out, he says
as he pulls down his pants.

i) They find her naked body in a creek,
stabbed 28 times, including the soles of her feet.

j) No one is saying anything. No one has been caught.

k) I sense the guys in my neighbourhood are planning something. They cannot accept me choosing a woman. My day will come.