Bangali girls couldn’t have
crushes in fourth grade,
and I was afraid to make
eye contact with the white boy

in accelerated math who wore
AND1 attire with Nikes,
seated beside the hand-crank
pencil sharpener that I’d pass

to turn in my problem solving
worksheet, face-down in
the letter tray beside
the overhead projector. I took

a dip in the communal cup
of dull-tipped Ticonderogas
to delay the walk of shame
back to my desk, where I’d trace

his name on the tabletop
with a bare fingertip
and wipe the wood clean—
fists clamped with guilt

for having girl-boy fantasies
during the similar shapes
lesson. I’d picture our names
on popsicle sticks, pulled from

the teacher’s mug, making us
partners for peg board geometry:
first period spent stretching rubber
bands into symmetrical shapes.

I tried to forget the probability
of facing the wooden spoon
at home if I lost points again,
daydreaming during the next

timed test (brown kids didn’t
get Bs in math) so I waited till
bedtime to practice kissing
the talking GeoSafari globe

that gave geography lessons
during our mouth-to-mouth
contact. When it was turned on
and I paused to think, it whistled

to make sure I was paying attention
to the game. I’d never be a candy
gram girl, but I dropped hints
in class: hiking the Hanes panties

inches above the waistband
of my Mudd jeans, hoping
the AND1 white boy
would see past the gifted

& talented, spot the cotton
with a Pocahontas print,
and eventually agree
to be my John Smith.

Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer from South Jersey. She is an AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry, and she earned her MFA from Virginia Tech. Anuradha has received awards from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Sun, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarterly West, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, Bayou Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Slice Magazine, Zone 3, The Normal School, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Anuradha can be found at anuradhabhowmik.com.

Zoran Pungečar (digital collage: 2018-11-29, detail) is a graphic designer and artist based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is ½ of micro publishing project Look Back and Laugh and 1/6 of riso art collective Riso Paradiso. He likes punk music and riso printing.

This poem was originally published in Salt Hill 43.