If India was a heart, pulsing and beating in my palm, then the National Highway 66 was a pounding capillary with traffic as steady as the flow of blood. Sixty meters of rugged ebony asphalt and mud-ridden intersections, the National Highway 66 guided everything, from taxi drivers with beetle juice between their teeth to bickering […]
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Forty-five-year-old Mamta Shah met her second husband at a student union in 2012, and they soon shared a cramped Houston apartment to begin their new life together. Shah had recently fled Nepal and an abusive marriage, gaining asylum status in the United States for her condition. She had endured the violent, volatile tendencies of her […]
Read moreexcuse me, but i am falling
i’ve promised myself not to scream
when i drop from the heights i bruised
my knuckles to reach
i’ve promised myself to let go with both
hands,
deep breaths, eyes open
Published by Rising Phoenix Review, National Gold Medal Winner at 2020 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Who like sporting bindis and calling them “eye-dots”, the california sun melting their makeup as they breathe in the desert air. Wouldn’t it be funny, if your third eye just happened to open that day, and a fleshy indian […]
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DUBLIN, California –– When 29-year-old Srishti Prabha said she was sexually harassed by her boss at her first job, she said she did not file a complaint with human resources. She did not find a lawyer and contact the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. There were no courtroom dramas or scalding accusations. Why? Because the only […]
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The Indian in me spares no expense with words every sentence decked in red and gold every phrase clanging like the silver bells tied around the necks of cows tethered to stakes The Indian in me is the master of flamboyance every stanza bursting with metaphors like samosas crammed with potatoes and green peas yet […]
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Thoughts and Prayers Carpet the bottom of my tongue, mismatched against the bruised upholstery of a nation stitched to the sheepskin of a gun barrel. The woolen mouth coughs into the microphone— For the victims, for the families, for the responders, for… for the screams swallowed whole by the whirling cylinder of a semi-automatic, for […]
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Kanchan 