Like Any Good Indian

Shikha Malaviya

(After Brynn Salto’s ‘Like Any Good American’)

 

I turn my face…..with acute awareness…..not giving them…..even an eyelash

I give my phone unwanted attention

scanning numbers…..friends who don’t matter

I count down the traffic light…..59-58-57 seconds…..then feign sleep

knuckles rap against tinted glass…..sometimes they call out

mother, sometimes sister…..hair matted, mussed up on purpose

at intersections if I should look…..they’ll pull out my corneas with a grimace

push their scent on my tinted car window

make me clutch my purse tighter

half opened palm…..the size of my heart…..beating like a silver coin

that I won’t give…..because it spoils them

___________________________

Shikha Malaviya — judge in ZO’s 2015 Poetry & Art Expo, is a poet, writer, teacher and founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Project, an online archive of Modern Indian Poetry, as well as The Great Indian Poetry Collective,

a specialized literary press. Her work has been featured in Sugar Mule, Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Water~stone Review, and other fine journals/anthologies. She also founded Monsoon Magazine, one of the first South

Asian literary magazines on the web, is the author of ‘Geography of Tongues’ launched in December 2013 and can be heard on Ted Talks at “Poetry of Life.”