please don't die

go back home

mama doesn't like flying to charlotte
on her business trips:
tells me about a hostile waitress
and accents that drawl across teeth
like bayonets on the warm soil of kolkata.
me, myself- it's harder to understand.
i'm lucky. i've never been isolated
in a room of white grad students
shifting behind bottleneck glasses and my
curly, frizzy, inconvenient hair. never had to
trip across dissertation abstracts
in a voice still used to bengali and relearn
languages of a science i am well versed in.
mama wears her hair pin straight now
and has replaced her glasses with contacts,
powders her face too light
and pronounces everything perfectly.
i notice and feel sorry.