The Color of My Desire

The color of my desire is brown

Like my skin

that loathed thing

Drenched in haldi and dahi to smother your singularity

Scrubbed with baisan to atone for your sins

And yet you refuse to be erased

The color of my desire is brown

Like my hair

that shameful thing

Burnt with chemicals and mehndi till you’re unrecognizable

Uprooted and molded with wax into the tame and orderly

And yet you keep growing where you are unwanted

The color of my desire is brown

Like my eyes

those ordinary things

The same as my mothers and grandmothers before

Hidden behind disposable lens, pallus and the veneer of proper

Taught to look nowhere, see nothing

And yet you look into their eyes with all that they could not break and all that they failed to steal

A generation of rage reaching out through me

A generation of love reaching out through the color brown

about the poet

Sakshi is a cultural producer, arts organizer and writer who is deeply passionate about transformative space making, vulnerability and feeling as resistance, and the power of stories to bridge, mobilize, and heal. 

She holds a BA in English and Communications from Simon Fraser University and is currently the Producer at Indian Summer Festival where she aims to create spaces that invite people into embodied collective experiences and evoke belonging, vulnerability, and community connections. Sakshi is a lover of literature – favouring stories of the fantasy, sci-fi and horror genres — and has always turned to reading and writing as a way to process her emotions. Her works often explore issues of sex, power and identity through the lens of the macabre and the weird. 

Born and raised in Delhi, she is now based on the occupied territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. As a South Asian queer immigrant and settler, she is working on accepting the complexities and contradictions of her identity, that love, nostalgia, and joy can coexist with conflict, dissonance, and pain.