A Boy Probably Likes Me because he was sick. His temperature a 100 degrees. The point where water became air. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t think anymore, from the cerebrospinal fluid bubbling away. From inside his head, that container of his face. Out of the nose that cut through the smell of my body. His eyelashes were thick, they looked like a step. The one I spiraled down, reaching the whites of his eye before jumping into his pupil. Dark, otherwise, how would light exist? Uneven pits on his skin reflected a body that belonged to overproduced hormones. Maybe those chemicals arrived out of love. His body a mother that stuffs rotis with more potatoes to make it thick and full. Before him, I never thought about the evolution of lips. Were they Lord Shiva’s bow, which had to be strung to show the worthiness of love? And when it broke, pink skies thundered, saying ‘Love has been found’. I heard the lips were the gateway sphincter to the digestive system. Why was there a difference between the lips and the asshole? When at different moments of thirst, they became the same. Soft entries to desperation. Hallucination. Trick. He, in the microscope, a thing called beauty. I am clear butter on a warm pan waiting to swell rotis.
Mayookh Barua is a Los Angeles-based writer from Northeast India, pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. His work explores sexuality, art, mythology, education, and family through a queer South Asian lens. He has received the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Award (2025), the USC Del Amo Foundation Research Award (2025), and MOZAIK Philanthropy’s Future Art Writers Award (2023). He was a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Fellowship (2025) and a finalist for the Dorianne Laux Poetry Prize (2023). He has been supported as a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Fiction Fellow and a Roots.Wounds.Words Fellow. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, SUSPECT, The Audacity, and other publications.
