Four poems by Kashiana Singh

Stay at home

often these days
my tongue breaks
recoiling as its energy
field trespasses yours
tackling each other
crumbling into
ridiculed bits

you fiddle with the
last placid raisin
in your cereal bowl

often these days
my words despair
scraping, stuttering
screaming, streaming
filaments of a foreign
body choke my trachea
my voice raspy

my fork is rapidly active
lacerating the chicken
nudging zest into marinade

often these days
is a need to ignore
deep attention being the
opposite phenomenon
a measure of coherent
focus towards each other
results in ejectile repulsion

since my first pregnancy
a mixed fruit smoothie
has always hit my guts

often these days
my awareness of you
is agonizing, your
gaze cuts into me
it evacuates me, my
kohl, a soot residue
drips with exhaustion

a palpable emptiness
urges hollows of dead
oysters to austere grief

often these days
I fall through the 
sphincter ensnaring
our lifelessness, into
a stupor—

in free fall
torpedoed into a series
of inane garbage shafts

often these days
is more often
these days

Where did you come from?

I could tell you of places I come from
before the world plunges into a dark
hole, but you would get thirsty and if
I brought you water, it would not be
enough for the tears you will shed
for the weight of the places I will
tell you about will be too heavy to
hold within your eyes, I could tell
you though, of all the places I am
from, have come from – the places 
I assemble together with comets of
anguish, places that scarred my skies
the places
that travel backwards into
wide spaces, the places
that say, “catch me if you can”

A rustling want

I want to step outside and listen
to the leaves, and let the birds
work their chatter into my veins
light seeping through my moss
reversing into my shadows, my
rhythms are incisive, strewn as
I break blades of grass with my
twitching fingers, butterflies in
my deepest dark stomach now
wait to burst their chrysalis, a
fluorescent outburst of crushed
sunsets, now finding my sunrise

I want to sit on the verge of my
tears happening in cloudbursts
as a smile waits, waits in frayed
mornings, always there in tints
as I pull back my window blinds

I want to change the way things
walk into my legs, my eyelashes
look into my lungs and brush into
them a gentleness, a quietude, as
I awaken into their fragile whispers
I want to write letters to myself, into
my northern lights, I want to then be
a compass inside pointing me to me.

Try

s p r e a d i n g 
your godliness into
b r o k e n breaths— I will
moisten your glassy eyes
I will dress you into 
wreaths of anger
gather from ocean beds 
fallen stars stilled under
under the unseeing watch 
of your own
lidless eyes

Kashiana Singh is a management professional by job classification and a work practitioner by personal preference. Kashiana’s TEDx talk was dedicated to her life mantra of Work as Worship. Her poetry collection, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. Her second chapbook Crushed Anthills is a collection of poems and photographs through which she unravels her journey through ten cities. Her poems have been published on various platforms including Poets Reading the News, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, Café Dissensus, TurnPike Magazine, Dissident Voice, Inverse Journal, Feminine Collective and others. Kashiana lives in Chicago and carries her various geographical homes within her poetry.