Zizipho Godana

Somewhere Between Gravity and Dust

The stairwell smells of boiled cabbage,

but when I look up,

the skylight is a glassy pupil,

the sky behind it vibrating.

A cockroach disappears into the baseboard—

its body a fraction of night

that forgot to leave.

I keep thinking about astronauts

eating peaches from a tin can,

their teeth sinking into light

older than the pyramids.

Every place has its own orbit:

the laundromat, with socks

spinning like shy galaxies;

the bus stop, where rain gathers

in the seat of a plastic chair,

a small ocean waiting for a passenger.

I once found my mother’s hair

woven into the lining of a winter coat.

It was years after she died.

The strand clung to me all day,

tethering me the way Earth tethers

whatever dares to leave her.

Maybe that is place—

not the street names, not the walls,

but the sudden gravity of a thing

you didn’t know you carried.

And when I lie down,

the ceiling fan slices the air

into four invisible directions.

I imagine following one forever,

until I fall out of the known,

the way a child falls asleep mid-sentence—

a body spinning,

a voice unfinished,

the room still listening.

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Image by Barbara Olsen from Pexels

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Zizipho Godana is a writer from South Africa. She has a BA in Psychology and Criminology from the University of South Africa. Her passion for writing originates from her deep love of cinema. Her writing can be found, or is forthcoming, in African Writer Magazine, Writers Space Africa Magazine, Frontier Poetry and Brittle Paper.​