Happy Little Nobody
Karthik Purushothaman is a Tamil-speaking writer of poetry and prose in English. He hails from Chennai, India and is currently an MFA candidate at William Paterson University of New Jersey, where he also reads submissions to the journal Map Literary. His poems have recently been featured in Rattle, and are forthcoming in Indian Literature, the English-language journal of Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.
I’m reading an actress
call the vampire movies
her day job that lets her go
independent at nightfall
and brand herself a nobody
in her hardcover backed
by a two-name publisher
who believes even a nobody
needs to be somebody
for anybody to care.
White men will be white men
thanks to this locker room
election so a magazine gossips
the sex stuff from the actress’
book, something about giving
high-fives after orgasm
after trying for two weeks
an unnamed man she swiped
right off celebrity Tinder.
Stop touching yourself
the teen idol says
while touching herself
with her bestseller book.
Meanwhile, I’ve been fasting
nights the past week—
the non-immigrant alien
student of writing must be
the poorest man in chinos
siphoning the university
library’s internet
to learn of the biweekly
two hundred and twenty-five
dollars direct-deposited
into the pit of my stomach
the acid carnivorous
tears into the influx
magic mushrooms
and my knees tremble
as I stand up and give
the invisible hand five.
Karthik Purushothaman is a Tamil-speaking writer of poetry and prose in English. He hails from Chennai, India and is currently an MFA candidate at William Paterson University of New Jersey, where he also reads submissions to the journal Map Literary. His poems have recently been featured in Rattle, and are forthcoming in Indian Literature, the English-language journal of Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.