My Name on His Tongue: Poems

Air Force visitors

28 Air Force visitors for Vasudha boiling desert summer singed our toes burned our souls pumped blood hot and heavy into every curve of our developing teenage bodies while our parents worked we paid a neighborhood hotel for membership to its pool so we could cool our bodies in the beautiful blue water watched over by a lifeguard whose face I couldn’t remember even then stranded between girl and woman content in a discontented teenage way we dove and jumped and splashed then stretched out on chairs to tan our bodies that peeked out of suits too tiny to accommodate eastern figures eastern standards would have shamed our eastern fathers one weekend the hotel filled with Air Force officers old enough to be our fathers they were playful, splashed and jumped threw us in the water as the lifeguard watched from afar 29 that summer I kissed a man twice my age near the ice machine he was muscular and short and dark and he liked me enough that he never did more than kiss me near the ice machine there are three kinds of women he told us there are beautiful women there are ugly women and then there are you two since neither of us saw ourselves as women beautiful ugly or otherwise we took it as a compliment twenty years later the details are lost all that remains: a faint memory of a kiss near the ice machine ...