Interlace

by Kiran Kaur

On the chopping board is where our love lives
I think of the rare occasions—
a spliced tongue in tow,
venerating before the sheath
I want to move him but he
maims me.
His skin, as tough as animal hide
ripe for the plucking
As I separate my teeth slowly,
I think of all the names I have spelled out
into incantations so that I could teach my lips
how to eat. He’s the only one who has taught me
to use my tongue before my teeth.
I swell with him, unlike the others before and after
Less with pride, more with ache hyperbolized into

Quad/ruple kum/ming

Me and him, delicately planted by
forefathers we know little of
other than skin, draped and tightened
over bodies bearing different tints
of warm equatorial rays.
Products of a meticulous assembly line,
the kumquats have a comparable lineage-
picked and shipped from palm to palm yet,
unlike us, indigenous to some other soil.
Oppressors for a day: we slice into fruit.
We do not feel its flesh singe,
dignifying our dna’s pittance to sentience.
To cut is to feel where feeling does not exist. To bleed then, is to see.

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Kiran Kaur is an aspiring Singaporean-Sikh poet. An alumna of REWRITE London, a creative writing collective, she is currently working on a poetry-memoir hybrid. Her work has appeared in The Mahogany Journal, a Singaporean space for South Asian fiction and poetry. When not mulling over words, she can be found holding one-woman concerts in her room, sleeping or creating esoteric playlists.