Mina Khan
​

the women

that day you died.
that day lasted twelve years.
there is nothing
more than this. cut
flowers. still yellow
waters. ripe
scent of rot. what is left
to mourn the living? the daughter
cheek slumped to
the lover’s breast. the seabird
twisted at
the neck. the ocean
reaching toward
itself. the nautilus
living.

---

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
so 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 4pm at 77th street
waiting, everyday, 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 my

         on Pornhub I type “school-girl 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
didn’t leave a mark

---

--
Mina Khan is a Korean-Pakistani American poet from New York, currently based in Chicago. Her work spans across nations, generations, to discuss the role of the woman, cyclicality, violence, tenderness, and the everyday. She was awarded an honorary mention by the American Academy of Poets and authored the chapbook, MON-monuments, monarchs & monsters (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2020.) She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and has been featured or is forthcoming in Epiphany Magazine, Passengers Journal, Pigeon Pages, the Margins, and more.