25/02/2026
Ashes Don’t Ring When You Drop Them
for Lo**ta, and the year we stopped counting
Lo**ta used to say a name is just a door you keep knocking on,
hoping something answers.
In Manenberg, they called her Lesley when they were kind,
tollie eater when they weren’t.
She told me that with a laugh that cracked
not in the middle,
but near the edge, where it’s safest.
She ran fast. Fast enough to win medals, fast enough to make boys cry, fast enough to miss the crack of a gun, fast enough to make even the devil ask, what direction she went.
At home, she packed birdseed into a bra.
Two fists of hunger held close to the heart.
Some days they pointed true north.
Mitchelle’s Plain se kant toe, she said, Atlantis toe
Some days they leaned left like they were tired too.
She said: look at me, I got wings now
and I think she meant it.
A friend I have now lost to time and neglect
once wrote she was reading Lo**ta in Tehran.
She grew up Muslim,
spoke of bacon like it could unmake her,
like salt on a wound she was born with.
And then I told her about Lo**ta in Manenberg.
How she stood in front of me, broad-shouldered and tired,
wearing a name that fit like a debt paid in someone else’s blood.
A name that let her pass.
A name that let her work, let her walk through rooms untouched,
until it didn’t.
She wrote back and asked,
How is she still alive?
And I didn’t know if she meant the body or the cost.
I didn’t know if it was a question or a verdict.
I didn’t have an answer either way.
Lo**ta said she waited over thirty years on the Groote Schuur list
to change vir’ie tiete en die minute
Said she turned back to Lesley
because the man I love knows me this way.
She said it like a confession.
Or a release.
Like letting go of a balloon and calling it prayer.
We didn’t bury her in January 2025,
when Trump signed the stop-work orders
not just for AIDS, not just for trans care,
but for everyone whose survival depends
on something more than luck.
We buried her in mid-February.
Not her body, which COVID took years ago
but the part of us that still believed
someone would come through the door with the money,
the meds, the solidarity calls,
some kind of plan scrawled in the margins.
Like maybe evening isn’t coming after all
maybe it’s morning again.
Maybe we’ll dance through it,
raise the dead, fund the clinics,
wire the hormones across borders,
get the visas, start over.
Move to another country
like the rich g**s do.
Throw down a deposit and call it freedom.
Make a life soft enough to survive inside.
But we stayed.
And she didn’t.
I write this down because I refuse.
Because forgetting is how they win.
Because 2025 and what Trump did to us is already being folded up,
tucked behind old budgets,
smoothed flat like nothing happened.
And 2026 is learning to look away.
I write this down because I refuse.
The waiting inside the memories,
for our turn to live without fear is easier to carry as ash
no weight, no shape,
nothing to trip over in the dark
Because remembering is how we win
And now it’s mid-February again, a whole year later since
the pills are still a struggle for the ones dependent on the state.
Since Mushin was killed.
The month we stopped speaking of directly
unless the topic is Valentine’s Day
or Cape Town’s tidy version of Pride.
We pretend the silence isn’t recent.
We carry it, politely, as if it’s always been there.
And because Lesley, Lo**ta, and Love
all start with the same letter
some days that’s enough to make me weep.
Other days,
it’s the only reason I don’t.
Elsbeth Engelbrecht
