butterscotch.

With the unnatural, and terrifying, neon yellow hue

and the crunchy bits of toffee

this ice cream saved us time and again

during the heavy heat of India.

Our last week in the country

we got our last taste of butterscotch

and stood under the awning

of the little ice cream shop.

The sky was dark

but the street lights were blinding,

the traffic roaring.

A young boy stood in the parking lot

with a vendor tray strapped around his neck.

No customers.

No attending notice

of the lonely boy

selling goods that no one really wants.

I stood and stared into the night,

didn’t even notice Collin had left my side.

I next saw him with a second ice cream cone in his hand.

He paid the boy notice,

paid him attention with an ice cream cone.

While we finished our butterscotch wonder

we walked by the young vendor.

For a few moments he felt enjoyment

standing under the awning

with butterscotch in hand.

For those minutes he didn’t have to sell,

didn’t have to worry,

didn’t have to linger around hoping for the sale of useless goods.

He was once again a child, like any other,

enjoying the cold touch of ice cream against his tongue, throat,

as the butterscotch melted,

sticking to his fingers and dropping into the vendor box. 

being human is an art.

“Being human is an art.”

But not everyone is familiar with the medium.

Not everyone can claim to be an artist.

It takes craft and skill to polish one’s own work.

It takes fine tuning to chip away the imperfections, the flaws.

My life’s work is far from complete.

Perfection isn’t the goal, but the desired object of completion is

something to be proud of.

A life worth living. 

the ganges.

Varanasi, India.

I cringed when Collin pointed out the bloated carcass of a dog,

floating in the Ganges.

I cringed when I saw a young boy, no more than the age of twelve, row two grown men on an Indian gondola on the Ganges.

I cringed when I saw a dog, recently dead, blood pooling fresh from its nose and mouth, and I wondered if the men who stood nearby working ended the animal or if disease did.

I felt odd when I saw a body hoisted onto the shoulders of family members, incense trailing behind reaching us in our high seats on the back of a tuk tuk, and I thought of who that person might be, but it wasn’t that person anymore.

But.

I did laugh when we went to the chemist for pain relievers and he tried selling me toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and all the necessities a westerner would need while in India.

And I smiled at the vegetable and fruit vendors, and marveled at the colors.

And we both laughed at the massive rama bull who kept getting swat at by vendors to keep it away from their goods.

And we smiled at the cows who were lucky in their positions in life to be fed fresh greens at the vegetable market.

And at the nightly riverside puja, Collin and I smiled, laughing to ourselves that even while our hands were clasped a young man flirted with me.

Equal pain, equal joy, equal laughter. 

four cities.

Visakhapatnam.

A glass coffin tethered by electricity,

creating a refrigerator to preserve death

until far-away relatives could pay their respects.

But the cold couldn’t stop the smell of decay,

which hung in the night air.

An intrusion of intimacy drifted toward

the American foreigners who walked by,

chancing upon the porch-side reverie.

Not knowing how to pay our respects,

we continued to walk by.

Varanasi.

Bloodied goat hides smattered along the sides of the roads,

preparation for an Islam holy day.

If not for the binding traffic and the sudden

stops of our tuk tuk driver,

struggling against our weight,

I might’ve missed it.

A body raised high on a platform

above the heads of those who carried it.

The heat of the incense and the weight

of the mantras sung in the air lingered far longer than the

tight traffic our tuk tuk driver muddled through.

Chennai.

The flash of the ambulance lights,

pulled far to the side of the road.

Several other cars followed suit.

I saw sneakered feet sticking out into the road, limp and strangled.

Don’t look! as we drove by.

Too late, my mind saw what I didn’t want it to.

A young boy crashed his motorcycle,

looked far too young to be driving,

in my country as well as this one.

Stones outlined the stilled body,

And the paramedics made no attempt to breach the fortified circle.

It was too late when they got there.

They just stood and stared.

Everyone just stared.

Jaipur.

Like Varanasi, but these streets didn’t narrow you in

with crumbling colonial facades.

Rather you were narrowed in by the expanse of the roads,

cars stalled endlessly on the dusted highways.

The walking procession weaved their way through

the otherwise impenetrable traffic.

The shrouded body swung lifelessly

to the rhythm of the mourners,

carrying their bereaved burden on their shoulders.

The chants absorbed into the broiling aluminum of

motorized transportation, forever sealing that moment of grief,

trailing behind.

streaming.

Re-creation. An adaptation.

My paint strokes are not flawless.

Some people’s faces are,

Not mine.

Speckled and spackled,

No hope in there being a glow, a shine.

Reflection. Refraction.

Eyes burn and twitch.

The twitch of a cat’s tail.

Spinning, sliding, jumping onto a string, dangling overhead.

A man hangs from a knotted rope. No cat will pounce on that string.

Just dangling. Like witches hanging from rafters, but he condemned himself.

He didn’t need spectators to tell him who he wasn’t.

The trees creak and quiver, but the night rushes on—too quick to catch a dream,

not quick enough for nightmares.

They come even as you wake.

Illuminated and stained.

A re-creation of what life could be,

but it’s not.

The paint leaks, but it doesn’t spatter.

It’s rough, but pretty, but not perfect.

I’m not either.

My lines aren’t smooth, my pigment isn’t pure, but I’m not a nightmare.

I’m someone’s dream: a waking dream.

I won’t condemn myself there. 

orange you glad?

Orange.
It's not a color that's high on my list. I enjoy eating oranges, but ultimately the color is just atrocious, and most people can't even pull off wearing it. Only very few skin tones are privileged (cursed?) enough.
Orange has always reminded me of all things drab and icky. Must I even say puke? And other various things that I just would prefer to not mention.
However, today I did find a medium in which I can tolerate orange, and that would be lipstick.
Unlike the ruby red lips, which I love to sport when I want to feel sophisticated and daring, orange lips are casual and playful. They are summer and fresh, and they will be my companion for the next few months until the weather turns cold and pale.

the face of evil.

I lay to dream, and when I fall

black spindly wings unfurl from

their roots on my back.

They extend like spiders’ legs,

leather draping from the joints.

I fight the wind and it exhausts under me.

Frost glues itself to my inky wings,

ice sprouts from the leather fabric.

I peer too high,

and others fear for me.

They say my wings are a curse,

evil courses through the veins.

But I’m not evil…I’m still me.

The wings are merely an accessory,

they do not qualify me.

So I wear them, and will continue to do so, peering, leering,

down on others.

My point of view is much improved. 

on remembering the unknown.

I stare into the mirror countless times a day, inspecting all the raw elements of my body. All the time wasted obsessing over the extraction of blackheads, the removal of hairs, trying and testing out the elasticity of my skin, stretching the wrinkles back five years, and cupping the back end that wasn’t nearly as big a few years ago, and all the while I wonder if my husband knows that I used to be sort of a hottie. Apparently he thought I was at the time he married me four years ago, but a lot has changed since then. I’ve adapted to his eating habits, I don’t have money for contacts, I don’t have time to exercise, I’m no longer tan but have the pasty complexion of an insider, and my apparel is slightly reminiscent of a librarian, and not the sweet and sexy kind either, just the frumpy grumpy kind that will harass you over late fines while her pantyhose are slipping down her chunky thighs and unshaven shins. And it’s only been recently, with my more engaged time with the imperfection reflection, that I’ve realized more boys like me than I ever thought was possible at the time when I was actually living it. I felt so sorry for myself that no one ever showed any interest in me, but now I know better, and I know a little bit more about how male minds work, but not entirely. I should’ve been content with myself and I should’ve stopped fussing over whether boys liked me or not. All boys, except for my husband, turned out to be trouble anyway.

But the other day I was thinking of one of those boys from high school. I was thinking of what a jerk he was, and how he brutally harassed me in the quiet, class-is-in-session hallways of our high school. He wasn’t always a jerk, and he didn’t always slam me into the lockers or knock my books out of my hands or make fun of my awesome change-colors-in-the-sun surfer tee shirt I got at Thrift Town. No, he saved that for after we went to the Pink Floyd laser show at the planetarium, and we sat next to each other in the dusty, broken down reclining seats.

His hand was placed on my knee, safe for a minute until the heat from his palm burst through the cotton-spandex of my pants to the soft and shaven skin of my thigh. His huge hand roughly gliding up my thigh until I picked his hand up and dropped it back at the safe zone. A few more rehearsed tries of his hand skating over my pants, and me dropping it back to either my knee, or as the laser show progressed and me desperately wanting him to get the idea, I even dropped his hand back in his own lap. Then, believe it or not, but mostly believe it since we were in high school and he was a teenage boy, he leaned in for the kiss. I pushed him away, and the lights went on, and my mind was no longer befuddled by The Wall or the boy who couldn’t learn. And as our group walked back to the car in the cold crisp downtown air, I kept my distance from him, and his lanky form strode next to his friend as they laughed and talked about the universe, or what have you. After that night, after dropping his ego back in his lap, he tormented me.

ugly american.

The Monkey Temple, Jaipur.

We grab a rickshaw.

80 rupees, Indian price.

I tell the driver we aren’t stupid, but

we pay anyway.

We round a corner and are dropped off

at the foot of the hill where the temple stands.

Vendors selling peanuts and sticks for the monkeys.

Peanuts to feed the animals, sticks to hit them.

We buy the peanuts.

We climb up the cobbled-stone road,

who knows how long it’s been there.

The stones are slick and worn,

and they lead us past onlookers stationed on their porches,

a herd of cattle, goats, and the terrifyingly humanistic

primates.

We reach the temple, pay our respects to Surya, the sun god.

He’s not a monkey, there isn’t even a relationship between him and

the creatures, other than they litter his temple.