I’ve swept the apartment and
scrubbed the sink. I curl up in a
sunspot on my rug like a cat and
breathe. I want to tell everyone
how great I’m doing. I want to go
back and say, Look! I couldn’t be
more pleased! And heave my
mangoes and poetry at them. In
my sunspot I decide that it’s only
for me– mangoes, poetry–
city abandon. A sweaty Summer
morning in a lover’s shadowed
Claremont apartment. My father’s
face pinned up against my peeling
wall, the glow of a passing siren
sending red against his laugh,
champagne spilling from the
bottle in his hands. High school
girls on the front steps of a
brownstone on the Northside of
Washington Square Park, knees
spread wide, paper plate pizza
grease painting their lips. Holy
whispers of precants as I wait
in the back of St. Paul’s nave, the
family of birds that flit among the
columns. A shared cigarette
behind the Natural History
Museum, on a Riverside bench, a
rock in Sheep Meadow. A
midnight: whimsical, breezy love.
And at 6: sunrise, seeped into my
sheets, into my naked body.
I keep it all for me as I wake.

Anika Agustin Malhotra (BC ‘24, she/her) is a Computer Science major; she listens to jazz; she is from the South.