Myesha Phukan

alternate names for unmarried married indian women

Honorable Mention

1. freed, because everyone knows freedom comes with a price, so now she sits with a white price tag dangling off of her shoulder
2. that one unfinished chore on the chart, the blank white box without a bright red check mark, shining starkly among a sea of other bloodied boxes
3. the black garbage bag with the red ties that’s been sitting in your house for too long, the one that no one wants there because it’s stinking up every room, but you can’t get rid of because the garbage truck only comes on Wednesdays
4. an unextinguishable flame, except, maybe it is actually extinguishable, because it wanes when a man knocks on the door
5. a lump of coal in a fortress of diamonds that no one wants to parade around, because they haven’t turned it into a diamond yet
6. melancholy music playing on a perfect summer day, but maybe it’s not perfect because “funeral” by phoebe bridgers is playing
7. a childhood book read simply too many times, and so, gets discarded into a pile of books that were also read so many times that their pages tore and spines cracked
8. threads fraying from a sweater that your grandmother made you because daggered nails keep digging into it, picking at the cable knit fabric until, eventually, it unravels
9. the lack of a red bindi on a forehead, and bare foreheads are failures, and failures need to be hidden away in a locked room
10. a dripping wet towel that’s not dripping wet anymore because it has been wrung too many times by too many people
11. those old-fashioned bottles of milk that people gulp down in one second, glass bottles being recycled over and over and over again
12. string that’s been fingered and played around with too much, so now those knots can never be untied
13. that one sheep that’s out of line with the rest, but not for long because the crack of a whip decimates that chance
14. simply a shame, because her mother never wanted a girl in the first place, but even after praying to god, if there is a god, a burden came out instead of pride
15. censored letters, thick black strikes running through every other sentence, because god forbid she tells the truth
16. pitied only by the rats in the walls because the sounds of constant slaps and bottles breaking make them jump
17. the “grand prize,” something to be won, but if he wins, she loses
18. fruit tartlets sitting in a glass display at your favorite bakery, but he dropped it so hard the pastry cracked, and the strawberries needed closed caskets

Myesha Phukan is a 15-year-old poet from Mountain View California. Her work has been published in Cathartic Literary Magazine, Detester Magazine, and K’in Literary Journal, among other places. A 2021-2022 Youth Speaks Unified Slam Champion, Myesha was a 2022 Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate Finalist and is currently on the 2022 Bay Area Brave New Futures Team. She serves as a poetry editor for Cathartic Literary Magazine, a poetry reader for Ice Lolly Mag, and a creative writer for Detester Magazine. In her free time, she can likely be found baking chocolate chip cookies or reading.