There was a bout of smallpox
once in Vrindavan too,
Radha says, fingering a
nearly heart-shaped cowpox
scar under her thumb.
Jane sighs, spits a wad of chew
and says: “Surviving is harder than
living.”
If he were mine, I’d have strung him
up like a rabbit, I’d have cut him with a meat
cleaver like I done to Jack McCall after he shot
Wild Bill in the back of the head, I’d leave him
in Sioux County without a horse or a weapon –
them people got their own gods, they won’t
give a hoot about his blue ass.
Chapatis make a flap flapping
sound against Radha’s palms, her
bangles tinkle like cowbells.
Jane sets her boots heavily on
the porch railing, swills her whiskey
in a glass.
They are both thinking of the way the light
looks in the dust the cows kick up at the end of the day.
Neelanjana Banerjee's fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Prairie Schooner, PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, Biblio, World Literature Today and many other places. She is a co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010). She is currently based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press and an assistant editor with the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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