Rita Mookerjee’s poetry is featured or forthcoming in Lavender Review, Sorority Mansion Review, and Spider Mirror Journal. Her critical work has been featured in the Routledge Companion of Literature and Food, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory. She currently teaches ethnic minority fiction and women’s literature at Florida State University where she is a PhD candidate specialising in contemporary Caribbean literature with a focus on queer theory. Her current research deals with the fiction of Edwidge Danticat.
Lost Girl, Taipei
cleaning my eyelashes over the sink
a custom practiced by most girls in your city you
never thought it odd
how I could make a crumpled pair spring back to life
reanimate the coiled mess with rubbing
alcohol and a q-tip.
it’s nice when someone notices the labor of good looks.
Your mother would draw me a bath in her massive tub
I wonder if she hoped I would come out
a girl worth calling daughter
sometimes we would eat so much that I felt drunk
in the lotus bud coconut jelly shark fin stew
wishing that someone would please speak English with me
ashamed to favor a language
(what kind of scholar does that make me?)
At the night market once I
saw a couple like us
wanted to scream out
help us choose
we are too indecisive and enamored with our idiosyncrasies
a pleasured mouth
does not need to speak.