The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Linda Rogers

Plain Brown Wrappers

When we were children with nipples
budding over the lonely muscle that would
eventually betray us, in love or in death,
we read magazines advertising creams
that would make us as beautiful as movie
stars we admired, their breasts full and
brimming worlds full of oceans and rivers.

These things came in plain brown wrappers,
boxes stamped with the words "bursting test,"
and, even though we filled balloons with water
and threw them at one another at birthday
parties, we weren’t sure whether it meant
the maximum load to be borne by the bags
and boxes themselves or the milky bosoms
with fine blue lines, like our grandmother’s
Wilton china, that would make someone love us.

We lived in a country that sent brown boxes
marked "gift" to children in Germany,
where gift means poison, and Africa, where
they wondered how to mix powdered milk
when they had no water. This little girl
received such a box out in the desert
where Oxfam toilets are used to make tea.
Her family was poor and her bones grew crooked,
so no one would marry her. Instead, when her
uncle sold her to pay his debts and she became
pregnant, Sharia, the law of Islam, said
she had to be flogged, one hundred times
for obeying her uncle and eighty for naming
the married men in the village who filled her
up with their sperm so no one knew the name
of the birth father when her water broke.

Now this brown girl, her breasts painfully
full, stands in the blood and milk-stained
dust of other girls who couldn’t wait to grow
up, waiting to be beaten so that she can thank
Allah for his mercy, for testing her and letting
her know how much a human being can bear without
bursting before she walks home across ten
miles of desert to feed her child. 

Linda Rogers is an award winning poet who has published extensively. Her work encompasses poetry, children’s books and fiction. She has hosted a programme about books and writers, ’Bookshelf’, and regularly contributes reviews for the CBC and national periodicals. Her publications include ’The Broad Canvas: Portraits of Women Artists’ 1999, and ’Say My Name: The Memoirs of Charlie Louie’, 2000.
Linda Rogers has also won a number of awards for her work, including the 2001 Petra Kenney Award.