Kanika Lawton
My Uber Driver Learns Her Nephew Has Been Shot While Driving Me to a Boba Tea House All of My Friends Have Told Me to Visit
I wonder if honey feels like blood, all
sticky and slick and I never learned how
to keep my fingers away from my hair.
I cut it short out of misplaced atonement,
shorn away sin with rust-bitten blade. Lived
up to my father’s name; tomboy and Tom’s
boy and being mistaken for boy cannot
save me. Could not save him, heel
turned left and bullet pierced right. What
happens when you don’t say the right thing?
When you say nothing at all? America
always finds a way to muffle everything
but lead, gun warmer than the hand
that holds it. Her A/C is too high but
I do not complain, grateful that I’ve only
made a home in hospitals because of natural
causes. Old age. Procession of time linear like
it should be. I do not think about his father
on the other side of the phone. Do not
think about his hands against mine, skin
as safe haven, protection, white enough;
first name be damned. I think about her ID
on the dashboard, security badge and all.
How she couldn’t protect him. How this
country couldn’t protect them. How it says
it’ll protect me, but only because I was not
born here.
Only because I am the right color.
Kanika Lawton is the author of the poetry collections SANTO CALIFORNIA (2017), Every Song We Could Never Listen To (2017), and Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018). Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Hypertrophic Literary, and Shared Horizons: A Rambutan Literary Anthology, among others. Founder and editor-in-chief of L’Éphémère Review, Lawton is a 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold and Silver Key recipient and a 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist. She holds a BA from the University of British Columbia and lives in British Columbia.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
To support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.
Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.