Kandala Singh

Breathless

(Delhi, April-May 2021)

My city’s rivers have dried, our fish choked.

Here, a funeral burning. The city

gasps for air. No ventilators, sorry. Die

outside hospitals, choking

for breath. The river of my city has dried,

its people choked. Here,

a black market for oxygen. Good folk

clinging to breathless bodies, failed

prayers. The river of my city dead, its floating

corpses choked. The burning funeral

piles up. We gasp for air.

Kandala (she/her) (Instagram: @kandalasingh) is a writer, researcher and teaching artist from New Delhi, India. She is a Dietrich fellow at the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her poems appear in Rattle, Rust + Moth, Eclectica, SWWIM Every Day, Hindustan Times, The Alipore Post, and Sonic Boom, among other places. She works as a creative writing coach and also co-teaches at Writing for Comfort, a series of mixed-genre writing workshops for adults. You can find her chasing clouds, flowers and poems on Instagram.