Indian Feminist

I would love traveling alone if it wasn’t so lonely. I would love living alone if it wasn’t so much. I wouldn’t need friends if I knew how to be alone and fulfilled at the same time but I think my brain computes that as some kind of conundrum. Maybe I am a bird in human form. A girl or maybe I am a mother. I kiss my lover and it highlights the emptiness that exists in the world. He is ugly as man. Drink doesn’t fill the empty. Neither does sex with eyes open or closed or with drugs. I travel but I am scared. I love but I can’t bear the other. Maybe my college education failed me. I think of all the rich white grey haired professors who I want to skin and shame. Maybe the problem was a father. I stab my lover with a knife—I think this is the first time he has looked so beautiful. Then the cook who looks at my chest. Then a father—I don’t even know if he is my own. I sit in a pool of the kitchen guy’s blood like a playing child. I travel alone and kill every he who scares me. I go to my mother’s college and cut away the fingers of her older writer friend who was always too drunk but meant well. I shave the head of her best friend who says that’s true. In the mirror, I shave my own. Alone I travel till I feel free.

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To Love

Mud-brown and from away
You lick the last of my biryani from your fingers
As your big hair falls down over green-rimmed eyes
Like a cloud; at my dinner table you smile

Your used hand you hold over your plate
And cupping my cheek with your left you tell me about your home;
Farawayonce, and now in me
I look at your oil-lined fingers that I will take inside me when we are done,

Your full bottom lip
That laugh of angels