Toothbrush Redux

Here it is again. Tinkered with. I heeded your suggestions, anonymous.
Did I heed well?

“MY BRUSH HAS MY NAME”

Mumbai, India

His youth of
two-and-a-half American bathrooms, one sibling, so no
doubts about what was whose,
he doesn’t quite get this

supermarket promotion’s free engraving of your name
on the handle with purchase
of toothbrush. His must be the first: Despite the engraver’s shadow
hard over the sharp-eyed apprentice’s shoulder,

their machine wiped to a precisely white incisor’s
approximation of sterility,
they have to start over four times
on fresh brushes. Swinging door interruptions. The street’s

black-eyed clatter,
a bandage-for-a-sari beggar’s dropped
cup restraining her leashed monkey’s foaming lunge,
their shared mirage’s

banana-laden and mutton-weighted
sleep like being cut wide open
and dumped empty for good.
His smirk’s imperfect. It wanders

a little too far to the right and smolders
around his earlier fall for
that milk powder scam so fusty
even its perpetrators can’t believe it still works.

He blames those tiny-on-the-hot-
jagged-sidewalk bare feet of the young girls.
A flanking flirtation, flame-smart
framing their pitch with a pinky’s


dab of ash around each eye, the essence
of hunger’s raw daintiness.
That disgusting percentage he bet
the shopkeeper kept

when, soon as he turned the corner,
they returned to be sold again
that tin of milk powder he’d purchased for their “little sister.”
Close to ten dollars.

A price that even his shopaholic aunt in New Brunswick pronounces
via email so outrageous for India it should’ve
shocked him instantly to running.
He toys with having them engrave

Osama;
settles on his parents’ schnauzer’s name, Dudley.
Sometimes his mother
brushes Dudley’s teeth;

that was a toothbrush
it made sense to label.