What Harlequin Should Have Showed Me
after Kei Miller
An aging Harlequin paperback dressed in
earth-toned monochrome, pages decaying to chartreuse,
offers me a shirtless white man,
pink nippled and sharp jawed. His yellow hair flowing
to his shoulders, matching the champagne bubbling in forgotten
flutes at the wayside as he sniffs his heroine’s neck.
His eyes are closed but I know
they are blue. His legs are not pictured, but
I know they are draped in ironed slacks waterfalling to a
basin of perforated wing tips.
But I have only known white men to be tricky things,
paying my daddy less for more work, smirking
while asking my granny where her accent is from,
prodding me to show them if what “they” say about
Indian women is true.
A muscular white man does very little for me.
What Harlequin should have shown me is
a man wearing honey Clarks the size of boats
docked at the shoreline of dark-wash denim,
tightly trimmed beard that his mommy always askin’ he
to shave. Standing at the bar watching some packs of
men fight over a pig-skin ball.
Sucking his teeth about some faulty officiating,
sipping cognac the color of his flesh. Then the music changes and
for a second he forgets all this serious business on the flat screen,
smiles as he pretends to jog in place,
hips knocking slowly this way and that,
extends his muscular arm, deeply veined, to point to
di barman before raising it to a wave’s crest,
pointer and middle finger to the north star,
singing with his friends in a voice filled with all the
joy he has labored to keep:
badmon pull up
badmon pull up
Directions for Making Love to Kes
Some men have been resistors since they
were their fathers.
Which old guide brought you here to his bed?
Let him sing azaadi up and down your spine,
ending at any lips he chooses.
Let him squeeze the plump of your breasts,
every delicious degree of your curves,
examining your parts like fruit:
Let him calculate just how much of you
is flesh and how much is juice.
Let him walk his honesty across your legs,
talk his adoration in flowery metaphors
of tea simmering to a boil,
of the steel pan’s rigid, echoing pulse.
Cradle his head to a lullaby of muffled bass
and that straining almost-there tempo you can
hear behind the closed door of a bashment,
until you descend the stairs entirely, push it open.
Until finally,
song.
Bilingual Adjacent
We’re in the C-Town on Crossbay when my uncle
makes conversation with a man at checkout.
Five items or less in hand.
“Yeah, these guys on the motorcycles, man.
They’re crazy. The other day I was on the Belt
and there was one guy going in and outta lanes,
just flying over the traffic like a bat outta hell.”
We’re at a New Year’s Eve party in South Ozone Park
and my uncle is talking to a school friend
he hasn’t seen since wheat flour was banned.
A patch of fluffy roti in hand.
“Dem man haunted, buddeh. Just di odda day
on di Belt I see one. Knockin
dis side and dah side like he mad.
If yuh see speed. And if he only geh lick dung,
all body guh cry.”
Elizabeth Shanaz is a New York based writer. Her work has appeared in Playboy, Human/Kind, Defunkt, PREE Lit, Zhagaram Literary, BRAWL Literary, Wildscape Literary Journal, Blood + Honey Literary Magazine, Soul Forte, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, The Literary Times, and the Blue Minaret, among other journals and magazines. She was nominated three times for the Best of the Net Anthology in the category of poetry. She studied writing and literature at CUNY City College before earning her law degree from NYU School of Law. She is the proud child of Guyanese immigrants.