Fiona Cartwright

LOCKED IN THE COMPOUND

The power’s out. We’re trapped in the house
by men who follow us down the street

their voices a mosquito whine
of Come ride my motorbike, baby.

It’s been dry for months: I’m washing my hands
in water thickened with dust. I peel

my bra’s wet pelt from my skin, discard
its sourmilk stink, drop to my bed

in the afternoon to sleep it off.
By nightfall
I’m done with the effort
of squeezing through this congealed heat.
I can’t eat.
You call from the garden door
to the indigo dim of the sky. Nightjars!
you shout.

They come from orange-stained street trees
to the square of air above our compound

weaving their prey’s trajectories
with flight. We stand still

as they honeycomb the dark, alchemising
flies into the feathered bats they are, a spin

of chaos, a spirograph of flight, a map of sated hunger
they draw in moped-choked air.

Fiona Sanderson Cartwright is a poet, mother and conservation scientist who lives near London. Her poems have appeared in various journals including The Interpreter’s House, Butcher’s Dog, Atrium, Magma, Mslexia, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Her debut pamphlet, Whalelight, was published in 2019.

Fiona wrote the following about ‘Locked in the compound’:

The African city in which this poem is set is, at first appearance, hot, dusty and polluted. However, it has moments of overlooked beauty, like the standard-winged nightjars (nocturnal birds) that hunted insects at dusk over our house one night. In this poem I wanted to capture and contrast both aspects, to encourage the reader to look differently at a place that is not conventionally attractive, but without romanticising away the many difficult aspects of living there its inhabitants face.