Kashiana Singh’s tightly knit poems, ‘Kindling healing’ and ‘The night spills’, explore night and day in all their haunting nuance and mesmerising movement.
Kindling healing
I weave my love into
Nerves, they weave
Taut through you, I
Form it so it stays
Minimal, not dead
Repeating itself like
A rhyme and refrain
Restraining you to a
State of ghazal, still
Piercing deep into a
Murmuring anxiety, it
Seeks not an escape
Nudging as you start
To be sharpened, in
Your own light, the
Candle in your eyes
Is my love, it alights?
I weave my love, into
Nerves that make a
Shrine in your body
It dissolves into your
Moon, a strained time
I am water, I pour seas
of quivering shadows, I
Wander into a night, a
grainy moon untangled
As I drench you with all
The healing gathered in
My whispering canopies
The night spills
I went for an evening walk today
Today a jagged corset was girdling a falling sky
Sky with a sun fixture benign, unenticing shadows
Shadows played into a peeling parchment, slowly fading
Fading quickly into oblivion, I limbless drift back again home
Home with my stained days coagulating, residual at the stumped base
Base of my spine, opens into every vertebra becoming a bleached fossil
Fossils scatter as I gather my fatigue into my knitted square tasseled blanket
Blanket with its delirious patches, a cohesive collection of my karmic medallions
Medallions strung on acreage outside as a cloud cracks open, noiseless a skunk sneaks
Sneaks into the night again, the night succumbing to a putrid stench
Stench that sprays itself across the liquid of a pregnant moon
Moon, casts a violet filigreed light that I manoeuvre
Again, I went for an evening walk today
Today was a full moon night
About Kashiana Singh
Kashiana Singh lives in Chicago and embodies her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her everyday. Her poetry collection, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. Her chapbook Crushed Anthills is a journey through 10 cities – a complex maze of remembrances to unravel. Her poems have been published on various platforms including Poets Reading the News, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, Café Dissensus, TurnPike Magazine, Inverse Journal. Kashiana is the winner of the 2020 Reuel International Poetry Award. She lives in Chicago and carries her various geographical homes within her poetry. For more information see Kashiana’s website here or follow her on Twitter @Kashianasingh
These poems were commissioned for our theme Night / Shift
For Night / Shift, we at Lucy Writers want to close our eyes to the rituals of the day and open them wide to the possibilities, sites, moves, sounds and forms visible only by night. Using Leonora Carrington’s work (see image above) as an entrance into this broad theme, we welcome writing – reviews, features, essays, creative non-fiction, (flash) fiction, poetry – and art work that explores night and its multiple shifts, liberating and otherwise, for womxn in particular.
Is night, as Carrington suggests, a feminine and feminist zone in itself, one which subverts daily codifications and rethinks day’s conditions? Or is night – also known as Nyx in Greek mythology, the maternal goddess of death, darkness, strife and sleep – still a period of discord, a stretch of time that threatens as much as it frees? For more information, see our Submissions & Contact page.
Feature image by Sara Rivers (follow Sara on Instagram @pixbysararivers).
