What do you call a first language you don’t write in?
Abandoned. Derelict. A lover in the form of a seashell swept offshore.
I am telling you I do not spit rhymes as much as I take control of
An immigrant narrative like no one else. I don’t know anyone as hungry for
A brown girl’s desire as a white man behind an editor’s desk. I don’t know
How to imagine him, other than with a pen in his front pocket &
Yet another brown girl love poem stuck between his teeth — extolling Manasi Garg
As though making himself mythic through cultural osmosis
Tenders him into a more important being. I don’t know anyone as hungry
As white men in poetry that click their tongue at each stumbled
Vowel at a slam poetry reading, only to slide a slam poetry brochure
Beneath their desks, and call it: “Opportunity, but easier.”
A white man behind an editor’s desk would not know opportunity
If it didn’t slide across his desk each week, embroidered each time with an exotic name
Of a girl whose phone calls back home are peppered with
Colloquialisms so heavy, she can no longer set down anywhere but atop
His desk. A white man doesn’t know opportunity because he bathes in it
Everyday, as he bathes in the words of every brown girl poet that
Crosses his desk. Desperate, desperate, desperate; his approval
Is all the cultural reclamation she needs.
Ayanna Uppal (she/her) is a Punjabi poet and a junior at Germantown Friends School. From Philadelphia, she is a graduate of UVA Young Writers and Kenyon Young Writers Workshop. She is a co-president of her school’s poetry club and, in her spare time, enjoys translating and reading Punjabi works.