Like Any Good Indian

(After Brynn Saito’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

Shikha Malaviya is a poet, writer and teacher. She is founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Project, an online archive of Modern Indian Poetry currently under development, 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. Her book of poems, ‘Geography of Tongues’, is forthcoming later this year.