dyeing
Poems listening to pussy riot
About the death of a relationship
1234 5678 9 10 11 12 Women have turned their backs on me like boyfriends. The same woman who liked the stories I told dropped Lexapro pills on my tongue like Hershey kisses each day for three years she told me he only liked me because he was hungry and I had food. I tried telling her I don't have much, just a bag of 99 cent chips from the corner store where the men smoke cheap cigarettes and stare instead of smile back I knew she was worried for me but I wanted the adults in my life to have faith. If you don't believe in God how do I? Forget the time I shaved all my hair off and my head looked like a prickly porcupine armpit Forget the time I wrote about mutilating my body because no body was doing it for me, in the sense that no body kissed me and told me I was pretty like a slow death. Maybe I want to see white tunnels? Maybe I want to put my mouth next to his and suck out all the snake juice from his veins? Maybe I am in love with the idea of having some body.
suicidal thoughts Everyone's blond and balding in this totally decapitated planet. All the girls are prettier than you; collectively dyeing their hair yellow for the first wave of sweet sixteens. In mid september you tell the hairdresser to make you the controversial look of vomit and sunshine because yellow is the color of bodily fluids and if there is one thing you aspire to be, it is to be sticky and immovable and very much in love like the other brown Barbies.
thin legs and European features
We started wearing makeup in 7th grade but we started plucking our eyebrows in 4th grade and even though your mother said my daughter is growing up in age it didn't feel like a coming of age It was awkward and painful like a brown body in a bathtub full of bleach and no one really talked about your eyebrows for some reason except the girls, they said you looked pretty like a Cara Delevingne even though you were feeling brown and tokenized like a Frida Kahlo.
BREAKFAST I started to bleed out while eating my Cheerios. it was painful sitting next to you and pretending I was this plasticine Polly Pocket thing, a body, a piece of property. I’m not talking about marks that wash away or scars that peel off if you’re brave enough. I’m talking about the damage from humans with devil hands, lobster claws that steal. Bleeding out viscera 16 years too late. LUNCH I spent too much time in the bathroom looking for my copper lipstick. There were these little crumbs at the base so I smeared them across my mouth and held random boys’ hands walking down the hallway thinking things like how violent can i get and i wonder what’s for lunch
DINNER I’m caught between two realities One Dinner by myself and the family ghost that doesn’t eat her broccoli Two Dinner with you and the way you eat all my ghosts.
you are so soft you are so mean
you picked your hair for me and put essential oils on the whites of your wrists and cut your fingernails down to guitar playing stubs and put nail polish on your tongue and fogged the word pretty into the mirror with slurred speech
You are so young to hold a wine glass and I guess that is the allure of appropriation.
Do you know any little girls with foul mouths? you are lovely when you roll the letters of my name around your mouth like plastic marbles and swallow choking hazards.
You just eat everything, from the couch stuffing to the paint off the walls. Forget dinner. Forget me. Keep ripping apart the couch cushions.
poetry zine made in 2017
Ananya Pandya