dear you dear me

By: Ishani Synghal

you hold an entire ocean inside your mouth you’ll swim

kal: yesterday tomorrow caught in sheer luck

and you know i know one day your knees’ll buckle into water

you’ll encounter problems:

opportunities

so what’s worth digging through dead skin for?

i hope your dry bones’ll keep awakening

and maybe you still take aching breaths over

broken skin brown sin

and whisper-swallow i still don’t know

ma says pray so they’ll hear you

but you know i know the gods don’t giveadamn

so write

to every ocean you’ll swim

with teeth tongue punctuation

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Ishani Synghal is a second year MFAW candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a poet first, but also writes creative non-fiction essays. Her poetry has appeared in Storm of the Blue Press's issue "robbers" and essays in the award-winning F Newsmagazine in early May 2020. Selected works are set to appear in the upcoming September 2020 issue of Levee Magazine. Ishani is based out of Chicago, IL and Concord, CA.