Mina Khan
How I Learned to Kill Mosquitoes
I have gotten very good at killing
with a hard-bottom slipper or
Raid designed to spatter pool drown
roaches and ants.
I never kill
between my skin or with a napkin
never crunched lungs
clapped splat in thin white tissue
too close to its needle mouth
so I never will
wear skirts
except from age five to
seventeen, a little plaid hunter green
too long to be sexy, too short to be modest
as soon as I got down the hallway
out of Umma’s sight,
I rolled the waist exactly three times so
the hem would hit
above my fingertips. under that I wore
scratchy things, tights that always smelled
like pussy. my hole was out and this
was not sexy. maroon heeled oxfords and bright green tights I was
fourteen on a subway platform
at what could have been four p.m. at 77th Street
waiting, every day, for the 6 train
when a suit dropped his briefcase,
I didn’t help. I watched his papers puddle and
his nails scrape the muck
off the platform and he
on his knees and bits of blackened gum
from the charcoaled floor and I
watched him fail, over and
over again to lift the edge of the document.
I stood there, knees hip-width apart and thought,
I should help him.
he is Asian
and I am Asian
and I should but
anyway, it turns out this was all on purpose
that he tipped his bag and struggled too long
on purpose
while his phone faced upwards to film
on Pornhub I type “schoolgirl up-
skirt subway” and I watch
so many do not notice the
camera none of them
are wearing hot pink undies
bought on sale for $5 which is, in retrospect,
too expensive, but also
if I found the video
what could I even do but
kill it.
because it was buzzing and it was summer and it landed on my wall.
sprayed it, hoping its body would limp and slip off.
it stayed stuck up there and it did not disintegrate
until December until I purchased
a very long stick from the Dollar Tree
attached to it a napkin and smacked
its body fell so easily it
couldn’t leave a mark
after september
each bodega.
each owned by a man.
each named Mohammed.
dark blue clothing. FBI badges. glint of steel
they knock and my father never opens the door.
the door opens. and
a shrew thrown overboard its fur
sopping
he squeaks. the plastic couch.
sunken I am not allowed in the living room
the coffee table scuffs
its varnish peels
poop floats up the fish tank.
after 9/11
cold silver stretches
across a slate-gray table
a room tucked in an airport terminal
you’ve never heard of. I arrive
my brother’s luggage already inside out. still,
they rummage.
I scrape. the skin. my thumb.
you look just like your mother
a red-bowed ribbon, zip-up sweater, Hello Kitty toothbrush
my mother’s 노리개,
elastic tethered to two puffs—
and the men
let me go
A Palm Reader Tells Me I Will Live a Long and Healthy Life
Halmuni has never been to the dentist but
at eighty-seven she still cracks crabs in one bite,
halves legs with her front teeth and
plops pink flesh onto my plate at the dinner table,
I never speak Korean, flakes of shell
red crunch and strewn about the tablecloth,
her children are American now and
at the nursing home,
no one speaks Korean Halmuni says it’s
drained her blood all white inside, she only eats American
now is the spryest she’s ever looked the other day
nurse didn’t help her to the bathroom because
nurse doesn’t know the word for 화장실 of course,
Halmuni cracked two ribs, healed in a day,
skin sprung taut, her cheeks undropped
and every day, she asks when she will finally
before, no one lived to sixty.
a reader with good reviews on Google describes my lifeline as
very long and a messy palm and that right now
my energy reads gray-blue anxious and depressed, but
this will persist through my very long life
I laugh, because this is a bummer, it really is
a myth, teenage
angst will persist, when I arrive home
Umma is splayed on her bed
pale without a blanket,
crab meat on a plate, a tender and
useless thing, a long life
stringing on her sheets she tells me
she is sixty years old, so in the last three days
she’s eaten nothing but burnt rice and barley tea
she wants to jump from somewhere
very high, but we only live
on the second floor her teeth are short and brittle
three root canals in the last year
I touch her belly, soft and cool
despite golden hour still
streaming on her skin
her stomach rumbles,
she couldn’t plan this far ahead
About the Author
Mina Khan is a queer Korean-Pakistani poet from NYC. She has been published in Pigeon Pages, the Margins, Prelude, the Berkeley Poetry Review, and more. Her concentration is in Poetry.