tinder whore

Los Angeles, CA

My Tinder feed is specifically unintentionally anti white-guy:
step one of the internalized brown-girl survival guide
is to save yourself the colonization. You’re looking for connection
and the most they offer is free wi-fi—why date a coffee shop,
the college degree will help you get by, even if it is a degree in...
... English. Okay. So maybe you match with that dude who thinks
his ancestors discovered lo-fi, Mr. Oil Money, Sugar Chaddy,
Mike who codes his love letters like Comp-Sci, all the sandy-hair sweethearts,
two-faced business school tools who—I hear fuck by day, fund the arts by night, 
I mean a swipe is a swipe—but mostly I worry why they swipe.
Wonder whether they imagine a curry-cooking-wifey, sari-slinging-mami,
skin like untapped gold rush, secrets where her legs touch
and what do white dicks even look like?               I don’t want to know.
So when I see Buster send me a message at 1am I’m like okay, Buster,
until it turns out Buster is a busty blonde at Loyola M and I’m like, okay, Buster!
I wonder why her gender changes things. Why bisexuals feel safer to me,
why bi guys are a haven sexual elite when we all grew up on Jasmine,
and I’d be silly to think only white kids laughed at Baljeet.
I bet Pocahontas helped Buster bust a meat before clicking Katara on repeat and 
god do I love Katara, but younger me worried I wasn’t half as sexy—
mystic brown Princess Peach eyes a bright blue fantasy—
girl how do you shave your armpits in that Fire Nation heat?
Share your hairless secrets with me.
Male viewers undress you while I wish only to be near you,
budding bi fantasy of what brown girl could be—clipped feminine audacity—
though if you were on Tinder all they’d ask you is what language you speak.
But you wouldn’t care, would you?           You’re no Tinder whore, no me,
no paranoid of any racial reference and what it could barely mean,
no second-hand fury, intergenerational trauma-speak
guilty of how any brown woman before me was perceived
no hyper-fixation, discoloration on your knees, no smell when you bleed
and no creepy categorization of Tinder guys into melanin gradient
dissecting the algorithm feed—but only when convenient.
Knowing there’s nothing wrong with white dick,
only the knowledge that every mother before mine suffered
because of colonizer seed.