Portside

fattest flies

By Ronelda Kamfer

there is a new breed

of vintage-wearing brown girl

who used to straighten her hair

and only spoke English

who had Foschini accounts

and only rode first class on

public transport

the type who had a boyfriend

when boyfriends were burks

the type who took offense

if I scanned something in error

behind the till at Clicks

the type that kept the

light skin gene in the family

that protective coloration

so prized by Coloured people

the type who believed that

au pair in Europe

is a title

the type that married

old, unattractive white men

because ambition has

bank account and it needs

to be filled

until the millennials went online

and everyone retired their GHD’s and Sheen straighteners

and bought their way back into the ghetto

they replaced their Johnny Depps with Idris Elbas

and made Michelle Obama Lupita Nyong’o and Grace Jones

their women of strength

everybody knows an Alice Walker quote

everybody listens to a Jill Scott

and supports a consciousness movement

they’re on trend

they’re Instagram feminists

they protest in the blogs

they use words like booty fierce and pro-choice

they deconstruct every American TV series

and they are

almost without exception

dumb as shit

whenever they get under my skin

I always remember my mother’s words to me

after one of them made me cry

because I wasn’t pretty

those skanks are like frogs in the rain

they hop from leaf to leaf

closer and closer

to the freshest turd

because that is where all

the fattest flies are found

Ronelda S. Kamfer was born in 1981 in Cape Town, South Africa. Her poetry has been published in Nuwe stemme 3, My ousie is ‘n blom, and in Bunker Hill. Her first volume of poetry, Noudat slapende honde (Now that sleeping dogs) was published in 2008 by Kwela Publishers. It has won the Eugène Marais Prize in 2009. She is currently writing her first novel, Kompoun about farmworkers in the Western Cape, where she is from.