Be sparing.
Before you praise our verve and vim
Consider this--

Sixty years ago half of us hated
a quarter feared, ten loved, the rest didn’t know who you are.
We had our songs, strings, our vices.
They are yours now.

We have done the unthinkable
By dint of shuffling and massive exertion
Increment by increment, you see.

You give praise like gold stars
Paper foil--
It’s easy to praise when you never suspect.
In class 5, the teacher gave the middling ones gold stars
The top got nothing. The bottom reprimanded.
By the end, there was nothing to give. No middle, only the best
The worst were the worst, fomented rebellion.
The ranks closed.

You thought us indolent?
Quiet sorrow. We are a quiet people.
You cannot read our loves and hates as yours
We have no literature of revelation.
No epistolary form, no inner monologue.
We would become indispensable, we said.

Close our ranks.
Our songs, secrets, our sins.
Take them away
Survival, we agree, is Art.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Affection
By Lakshmi Krishnan

Affection is a moth that seeks discontent
Itches its legs against the flame
And tragic,
Burns, then wings toward oblivion

That is misspelled.
I look up, wheeling in the sky
A feather, a wing
Translucent and lacy
Like papier mache beaten fine as gold
Paper-leaf thick as bark

Words have legs
And feathers too
Feelers that sense each other
to push apart

Michigan summers we cast wingnuts
Ammunition as harmless as trivia
As we flung, they wheeled away
Then ethereal, landed, soft as silk shoes
Gracefully pirouetting
Ballerinas in the dust.

Lakshmi Krishnan lives in Oxford, where she is a doctoral student in English. She was born in Bombay and grew up in England and the United States. Her work has appeared, among other places, in Exquisite Corpse, Identity Theory, Cerebration, and ASH, the journal of the Oxford University Poetry Society. She is a 2007 poetry winner of the ISIS (Oxford's premier literary magazine) Creative Writing competition.