A fruit market on spindly wooden stands
          is built by the side of the road.
     Next to the melons,

a barber lifts his knife,
          his client's face
     full of white lather.

A clump of laughing women
          in a rainbow of saris
     crosses the street.

Japanese Maruti vans honk
          past ancient Ambassador cabs
     built like tanks.

A man clad in a bright pink turban
          and an orange scarf
     around his neck smiles without teeth.

The market vendor deposits
          red onion skins in the gutter
     and three cows gather,

push their noses deep in rich reddish-purple,
          stopping traffic,
     as if they knew they were gods.

Vipul's astrologer recommends
          he wear a blue sapphire
     and make a pilgrimage

to the site of Krishna's birth
          to bathe in the water there.
     Maybe then his luck will improve.

The smell of the streets
          grows sharper at night.
     Spices, wood smoke,

dust, cattle, and sweat. Chandan,
          a sandalwood paste,
     used in Hindu temple rites.

The burned smell of chapatti,
          round wheat bread made
     over an open flame.

The faint smell of drying flowers
          strung together
     in orange garlands.

Incense, more spice. And more dust.
          Dust wrapping
     everything in a thin coat

that gets inside your nostrils,
          that enters your food,
     that cannot be washed away.

—Ethan Fischer , Montserrat Review

—The Alsop Review

—Kathi Wolfe, Scene4 Magazine

—Cheryl Snell , Rattle

Kim Roberts is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly and author of two books of poems, The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994). Roberts is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington. She has been awarded writers' residencies from eleven artist colonies and has published poems in journals beginning with every letter of the alphabet.

Website: http://www.kimroberts.org