The Township Shall Swallow You Whole Poem by Xolani Majola

Nobody warns you how quiet it gets before the mouth opens.

By nine, the corner boys already know your name, know which house you sleep in, which taxi you take to school, and they wait there anyway, plastic bags of white passed hand to hand like communion nobody asked to take. Down the road a girl who used to skip rope is stroking a stomach she didn't choose, and everyone calls it grown-up like it's a compliment.

I've counted more funerals than birthdays this year. The graveyard fills faster than the classroom empties, and both are emptying at the same terrible speed.

My aunt opened a spaza shop with her pension payout. Six months later the shelves were bare and so was she; no loan came, no help came, just the slow bleeding of a dream nobody insured. Somebody said it was 'african magic', said someone was jealous, lit a candle, said her name three times backward. Maybe it was witchcraft. Or maybe it was just a township that never meant for her to win.

By month-end the queue outside the grant office is longer than the one outside the church, and nobody's ashamed anymore, because what else is there when the jobs left before you were even born.

I stayed in school. I don't know why exactly; maybe out of spite, maybe out of fear. But the streets noticed. They always notice. Suddenly I was 'acting up, ' 'thinking I'm better, ' like wanting more was a kind of betrayal.

My mother used to say the township doesn't hate you, it just can't stand to watch you leave it behind. That's the cruelest kind of love there is; the kind that smiles while it's tightly holding your ankle.

So I packed light. I didn't say goodbye properly. You don't linger in a doorway that's already closing. Because this place will hold you until it loves you to death, and I wanted to live long enough to come back and mean something.