My Sister Collected Pills by Juleus Ghunta
In this poem, Juleus Ghunta – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry – juxtaposes the ordinary lives of his peers with his sister's suicidal ideation.
The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.
Some of the boys collected beer bottles at the go-go
club in the square / We sold them to D&G trucks for ten
dollars a crate / My sister collected pills / Sara collected
folktales / On story-nights, we saw scarlet eyes of Rolling
Calves blinking in bushes behind her / Over-the-counter
& prescription pills / Ryan collected Kungfu films / We
recreated scenes in the street, feet stretched above
our heads, fingers curled like cobras / Pills left idle in
cupboards & in the clinic dump in Grange / Tata collected
tyres, chased them down inclines, his throat the sound
of engines / Excedrin, aspirin, metformin, prednisone,
paracetamol, perindopril / Some boys collected elastic
bands & y-shaped sticks; made slingshots, shot birds &
each other / She kept them in a jar tied to a slat beneath
the bed / Before she died, Reeka had collected scraps of
cloth to plug the hole left by her appendectomy / Mum
found the jar while cleaning, emptied it onto the bed,
urged her to swallow them / Alka, who collected broken
figurines & appliances, believed anything could become
whole again / She raised a handful to her mouth / That
night, I collected sounds of my sister weeping / Before we
knew anything, my siblings & I learned to hold each other
until we felt whole again. We took her to a river where she
sacrificed each pill for a river stone, took turns carrying
the heavy basket home / My sister collected river stones /
The line ‘I collected sounds of my sister weeping’ is a slightly edited version of a line in Jericho Brown’s 'Duplex'. The original line is 'Like the sound of a mother weeping again'.
The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June. Submit here.
Image: Dodo Head on Pillow by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
