What More Does a Girl Want?

This poem had appeared in The Narrow Road zine.

What more does a girl want?

·        notebooks. new, with hard covers so the pages don't get torn from being carried in an overstuffed haversack in which pens of five colours sit with lipstick, eye pencil and leftover lunch rolled into a plastic bag that the grocer still gives her in defiance of the government ban.

·        dreamboats. princes from neon fairytales. more Tangled less Rapunzel, more Brave less Cinderella. maybe even Shrek. green ogres are okay if they have bothered to install solar heating.

·        accent. only one. it should mark her as someone who is from somewhere. a potpourri of place and race but with a distinct lilt and lisp. an aural scar of having tried and failed at belonging.

·        a ghost. tripping over the ankles of night, clanging chain dragging a four-poster bed by its left foot (note to self: do not repeat, find ways to make new, new. break old ground and

bury the dead).

·        photo frames. papier mache. jazzed up with gold paint and tinsels from a stationery shop right outside the school where the principal as good as spat once at her family's good breeding.

·        laundry basket.

·        nylon rope.

·        pepper.

·        radio.

·        sad horses that appear mysteriously outside the grocery shop that sits nervously beside a wine shop and does frantic midnight business in fried peanuts and triangular Amul cheese cubes.

·        silver shoes.

·        neon shoes.

·       sensible shoes that assure you she is no hurry. she has walked so far, so so so far to be here,

with you.

(C) Annie Zaidi

First published in The Narrow Road litzine