I Want Everybody to Love Me

By Ashish Kumar Singh

Inside the hotel room, when we were
done undressing, he asked me if I was into it,
and though I did not know what it was,
I said super nonetheless. Then, when I found
what it was, I no longer wanted to do it
but did it anyway because I wanted him
to like me, to not regret his decision
of choosing me over the others. It is a desire
I have had since I was a kid— 
to make everybody love me. One time,
an uncle on a visit asked me to recite a poem
when my mother told him I only read
English books. She said it
with so much pride, I knew I had to step up,
even though I knew not a single poem.
But only if you had seen the joy
that danced on her face—the childish joy
before the fireworks awaken
the night sky—you would’ve come up with
anything too. And if she had said, My son
here can fly, trust me, I would’ve flung
myself out of the window. Inside the room,
when I have finally convinced myself
that at the end, I will be fine and let him do it,
a line from a poem comes to mind,
a line I haven’t read in years, a line that,
if it had come when it was supposed to, then
                  mother would have loved me.

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Cleanliness

By Ashish Kumar Singh

Tonight, the world is losing too much— 
trees, their leaves, sky, the light, owl, its life.
Walking home, I keep wiping my lips,
lest the man I made love to still lingers.
Just yesterday, mother yelled at my brother
for bringing filthy toys into the house.
She had said, this is a temple and we
keep it clean. And since I think everything
is about me, I took it upon myself to never
bring back souvenirs, not even their names,
which I spit out as soon as we are done.
I ring the bell and wait for my mother to
greet me like a nurse a newborn.
When the door is opened and she motions
“get in”, I leave myself
              with my dirty shoes, and enter.

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Poem Written at the End of the World

By Ashish Kumar Singh

As the world outside burns
and cracks open like a roasted chicken,
I sit on my desk, the window looking out
at the ocean, which evaporates
with tiny fish trapped in pearls of sea
water and wonder at the human
consistency in destroying everything
we have been given. People shout
as they board the spaceships bound
for the planet some mad scientist
discovered, leaving in disarray the one
we were all born into. And who's to say
the same won’t happen to Space3X
since we are carrying on our shoulders
like toddlers all our vices.
I’m going as well, but will leave
my expectations here. To begin with,
I never liked Earth.
Was born too late, and by then,
it was already too hot and too cold
simultaneously. Every beautiful
thing had died, except for the ones that
managed to escape our attention,
and them, I didn’t get to see. I know
everybody needs a restart;
I certainly do, and maybe this is for you.
I pray, since this is all I can do
to the gods we are abandoning
and to the ones we’ll eventually accept,
that if you choose to populate earth
again, do it with goldfish.
Imagine millions and millions of them
floating amicably, so unlike us
and so unlike blood, making small,
        beautiful sunsets in the ocean. 

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Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer Indian poet whose work has appeared in Passages North, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Grain, Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. Currently, he serves as a poetry reader at ANMLY.