After every war
we scrape the blood off our fists,
rub the horror out of our knees,
stubbornly cling onto life with our stubborn hands
and grin with blue flesh stuck between our teeth
and no one mentions the war again.
We all know how to dig the fragments
of grenades off our bodies,
the very same bodies
we helplessly dragged out the unforgiving soil.
No one tells you that war and love
is a plagiarised language of ruin.
We wake up to the misplaced sounds of men
Stomping on our chest with their filthy boots
Mistaking us for the dead.
Silence.
You realise that when the war ended,
it started inside your head.
It’s not fair how we stay trapped in a battlefield
that’s now marked x on the map
but who’s looking?
Who do you run to when the smoke
is already inside your bones?
After every war, no one asks
who’ll pick up the pieces
when our limbs are left in the battlefield.
Thubelihle Chance Ntombela is a South African based journalist, author and LGBTQ activist whose work has been published in several publications including Metro UK, Sunday Times, Nounouche Magazine, Cosmopolitan and countless others. He tells stories in every possible way.