St Mary’s College, Rose-Hill Ameerah Arjanee

St Mary’s College, Rose-Hill
Ameerah Arjanee

Vidushi and I sneak into the boys’ toilet
during recess. The walls smell of shit.
We feel like rebels, check ourselves out
in the cracked mirrors. Read the words
scratched into glass and beige paint:
“Kevin luv Naiis¹“, “Movai gogot”², “Pitin”³.
We comb our fringes. Giggle. We have never
been so brave.

Back in the yard, we revise our French verbs.
This is a boys’ school, but we come here
in the afternoons for French tuitions. We are
intelligent girls. We wear no perfume,
we wear skirts that reach our knees.
We sometimes kick a dustbin, giggle.

We pace the yard like queens, enunciating our “r”s.
This is a boys’ school. We are strangers. The air
is full of testosterone and shit and the smell
of empty potato chip bags. We pace the yard like queens,
enunciating our “r”s. A muddy football lands at our side.

A boy in a sweat-drenched shirt comes to pick it up.
He grins. He has spiky hair and a smile like a shark’s.
What could his name be? Zayed or Kevin,
yeah, something like that.

Oh, we know those boys. They have girlfriends
with legs like storks.

We ignore him.
Or at least pretend to. We have our French verbs to revise,
all of the tenses, although there is only one in the end:
“…présent de l’indicatif, présent de l’indicatif, présent de…”
The bell will ring, the bell will ring, the bell will —

Previously published in Morning with my Twin Sister and other poems (l’Atelier d’Ecriture, 2014)

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Ameerah Arjanee is studying for her last year of a liberal arts degree, with a focus on applied foreign languages and translation. She was an overall winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award in 2010 and was commended in 2011. She was also runner-up to the Elizabeth Bishop Prize in Verse in 2010 and one of the winners of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for Lyric Poetry in 2012. As a member of the creative writing club l’Atelier d’Ecriture in Mauritius, she has published two collections, the second of which is available here: http://librairiemauricienne.com/ameerah-arjanee-2/.

Éphémère is a concept; two visions of the same sphere. Both are multidisciplinary Mauritian artists—designers and illustrators—influenced by nature and culture. They attempt to convey a part of their dream-like, somewhat playful world through their art and products. (Photo credits: Céliliphotographies)