2022
She looked straight through me and saw nothing but circles
She looked straight through me and saw nothing but circles. She told me that I am made of round things. The last grape left in the bowl before it is places onto a lucky tongue. The green glow of a traffic light urging you forward. I let her look through me like I am the mouthpiece of a beer bottle inviting her to place her lips upon me. My pupils and my belly button and my nipples are circles too. I try to create sharp angles with my body, crook my elbow into the letter L. I list words that start with L. Love, lust, lesbians, linguini. She laughs. She reaches her hand right through me and touches a round, smooth doorknob. I don’t cry when she turns it, I don’t even want to. Marbles flood out from my chest, spill out on the rug. How could anyone love a person filled to the brim with endless things? We fall into bed like it’s the ocean. What if she likes happy endings? What’s a story without an ending? What if we go around in circles again and again and find that infinity is just half an inch away from nothing at all?
But then we fall into bed like it’s the ocean. Kiss in a way that begs for eternity. And who am I to deny eternity.
Published by West Trade Review Spring 2022
2021
An Almost Love Letter to an Almost Stranger
What I’m trying to tell you is some nights I drink too much. Make a note: wine comes with strange dreams and stranger mornings, sometimes with strangers and sometimes alone. Oftentimes both. Some men think they know what God looks like, but you already knew that.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, tongue still red and almost swollen but not quite, you rock me back to sleep. Your arms are tight and pinker than I expected, your socks are grey and dirtier than I expected.
I don’t know who you are.
I think I wake up in the middle of the night and you rock me back to sleep, but you say you slept through the night and that I smell different in the morning, less like gardenias and more musky like my father.
My father would have liked you.
Who rocked me back to sleep? Do you know what God looks like? Please describe him to me in as much detail as possible, I want to be able to taste him with my red, swollen tongue. When the rain falls on a sunny day I almost think I can, did you already know that?
My toenails are bright red and I ask if they can circle yours while I describe my strangest dream to you. I was sitting alone on a roof with a man who told me he could draw me a picture of God. He tried hard, but the ink from the red pen bled each time it hit the paper. We had both forgotten it was raining.
My mother wouldn’t have liked you very much, she has a hard time with dirty socks.
I put a bucket out to collect the rain. It filled quickly, and again I was sitting alone on a roof, next to a bucket filled to the brim with a man who tried to draw me a picture of God, but did not try hard enough. I collected the bucket and brought it into my home, except it wasn’t my home at all. It had far too many windows and doors leading to the same place.
I climbed between the sheets, thought about men who can’t hold their liquor like me and dug my fingernails into my thighs. My thumb wandered when I thought about how you’re not like them at all.
While stumbling out of bed, I tripped over the red bucket and spilled you across my wooden floors.
What I’m trying to tell you is some nights I drink too much and have the strangest dreams about the strangest strangers, some who rock me back to sleep and others who sleep soundly through the night.
Published by BigCityLit Summer 2021, nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
I have this bad habit of searching for myself inside of blue eyes. I expect to gaze into them and see myself skinny dipping, swimming the backstroke and laughing as I let my hair straighten out in our private pool water. Or perhaps the bad habit is that I’m shocked every single time she’s not there.
Josh #1 called me a slut when I didn’t want to sleep with him. He took it back after I did.
Michael #1 told me he loved me while we were drunk on the Bud Light he stole from his older brother. He denied it the next morning.
Tommy #1 loved me even after I cheated on him with
Tommy #2.
Jake #1 sold pot on the side even though his parents made six figures.
Michael #2 had a girlfriend, I don’t think she ever found out.
Josh #2 called me an Uber pool the next morning after promising he would drive me home the night before.
Jake #2 never called me back after I told him I had been raped by a different white boy with a different white boy name.
Josh #3 wakes up next to me every morning, kisses me on the nose. On sunny days we go skinny dipping. I do the backstroke and laugh and pretend I’m swimming through his eyes.
Published by BigCityLit Summer 2021
Leaving Skeletons in His Closet
There was once a promise that I would travel to
the ends of the earth for you; I want to apologize
for putting on such a foolish performance.
Sir, I can see your bones right through your skin,
I see your veins, muscle, fat,
they paint a picture of individuality,
they are unlike any other painting I have seen before–
and I have seen hundreds. I have touched dozens.
I have loved several.
Invisible skin on a man tells no stories, both our clothes
drop to the floor but only one body is exposed.
You cannot see the cracks in my bones
or how they ache in a way that can only be inherited
or stolen. You cannot see the picture I have been painting
under this skin while waiting for you to
come home at the end of the night.
My bones are cracked from being left behind,
naked in a bathtub full of terms of endearment–
love, baby, sweetheart,
sir.
The faucet runs and runs
and the tub never fills.
Would you have traveled to the ends of the earth for me?
Please don’t, but would you?
Did you shave your chest to prove something?
I flow towards you like red wine, a thick merlot, but
you are a chardonnay paired with the whole fish.
When I make eye contact with the fish she tells me
that she calls you sir too. We are both
stripped to the bone,
one after another.
There was no wedding or death, but
I still call myself a widow.
Published by Nine Mile Literary Magazine Spring 2021
I cannot wait for you to become who you were
You had me at the sea glass wine bottle,
stained deep and blue and endless like the night
draping itself across our shoulders.
We howled at the moon that night, our voices
crack-crack-cracking into the sky until the glowing orb
fell out of the darkness and landed at our feet.
What if we hadn’t put it back all those years ago?
Shake the night off your shoulders, you don’t need it anymore.
Do you still see this world through stained glass?
Lately, the moon’s been coming out in
the daylight and I swear I can
hear you outside throwing stones at it. I hear
them barely missing your feet on their way down.
I howl at the moon in the daytime,
and swear to eat it the day it howls back.
Published by Nine Mile Literary Magazine Spring 2021
2020
There is a monster thrashing in my belly
and stolen soil pushed under my fingernails
ancestors running between my earlobes
God crouching behind my eyelids.
I touch this poem and feel it pulsate
I put words on a page and let them breathe
without me. Let them scream
without me.
America’s roars burn pits in my stomach,
I cannot sleep with all this noise.
Police killings and
deportations and
shooting guns are too loud
to be drowned out by poetry
and we cannot sleep with all this noise.
My mother has not slept since 9/11.
My brother has not slept since Sandy Hook.
My sister has not slept since election day.
I have not slept.
Somewhere between
poetry and freedom
you can almost hear us
whispering,
America,
you were supposed to be gentler with us than this
Published by South Asian Sexual and Mental Health Alliance Fall 2020
A Support Group for White Men Who Just Can’t Get Enough of Brown Pussy
“Hi, my name’s [insert name here] and I just love exotic things.
The colorful birds, the hot places,
the beautiful women.”
He says he doesn’t mind her crooked nose and kinda likes the way her leg hair grows back overnight. He wishes she’d call her mother less. He says the way she speaks is funny, he wishes she’d do it less too but only admits that here. He likes the way her words taste, he likes the way her lips taste, he doesn’t like the way her cooking tastes.
*Collectively*
“Hi, [insert name here].”
“Hi, my name’s [insert name here] and I’ve always had a sweet tooth.
Sometimes Hershey’s just isn’t enough.”
He says he would never bring her home to his mother. He’s never met hers. His roommates can’t remember her name no matter how many times she comes by. He thinks she’s embarrassed of him when she’s with her friends. He’s not embarrassed of her, he just doesn’t think she’d like his friends. He voted for Obama. He voted for Bernie. He doesn’t like to talk about anything past that.
*Collectively*
“Hi, [insert name here].”
“Hi, my name’s [insert name here] and I can’t get enough of spicy women.
The hotter the better.”
He says she’s different than the girls he’s been with before, not better, just different. He doesn’t like politics or spending the night. He says he likes the way her skin melts off her body and into his hands, the pigment coating his palms, building up under his nails. He likes to use it to finger paint his name across her bedroom walls before he leaves.
“Hi, my name’s [insert name here] and I hate coming to this group,
it makes me feel unoriginal.”
Published by South Asian Sexual and Mental Health Alliance Fall 2020
I collect stories to share with my daughters while praying for sons
The women in my family tell stories without knowing who’s listening. We dance without music, sing songs about the ancestors we have and the ancestors we’ll be. Sometimes, when the wind takes a night off and the air is heavy and still, we tell stories of the men.
He told her that he was leaving
while his tongue was still pressed
against the roof of her mouth.
She contemplated biting it off,
but was afraid of the sting of
hot Punjabi blood
she never quite got used to.
Instead, she waited for him
to remove his mouth from hers.
He repeated himself,
I’m leaving.
She bit off her own tongue
before he could finish his sentence.
The morning breeze starts its shift at daybreak, there is no more talk of the men. We spend our days wondering if our tongues sting, or if they’re even there at all. On cold, gusty nights, she visits us in our dreams, and we greet her with the lullabies she once sang.
Published by South Asian Sexual and Mental Health Alliance Fall 2020
Edited book of poetry translations from Hindi to English, originally written by Simran’s Dadiji Sunita Jain
Published by Sabhya Prakashan Spring 2020
2019
Picture the bottom drawer of the bedroom dresser,
always left crooked and open
and watching with eyes that just learned
they are allowed to watch.
He could close the drawer if he wanted,
make it look just like it did in 2006, or 2014, or
any other year a new type of bird was discovered,
but this is not a story of another year of the same.
This story is about painting freckled noses,
etching rainbows into empty skin,
kicking the bad habit of nail biting, hand picking
a single tree outside the window to dream of perching on.
It’s about eyebrows and cheekbones and questions
and liberation and it’s about none of these at all.
It’s about him, and the bottom drawer of the dresser
that watches him get dressed in the morning.
I’d like to hide in that drawer, the bottom one
left crooked and open and seeing.
I’d like to watch him brush away the
dark circles from a sleepless night.
Imagine a man,
just like any other man,
but with colors dripping off his calves.
Imagine a man,
not like any other man,
but with wings instead of arms.
Winner of 2019 Anselle M. Larson Academy of American Poets Prize
Finding Home in Places I’ve Never Seen Before
Pennsylvania is shaped just like
the patch of white fur on the belly of a cat
who will make home on the wrap-around porch
I don’t have yet.
Pennsylvania will hum as the cat purrs and together
they’ll sing my mother’s lullaby.
Warm milk spilled onto the granite
countertop I don’t have yet
will remind me how much I love abstract art,
especially when it looks so much like my father.
Pennsylvania will brush up against the grass
of the lawn I can’t mow yet.
It will run itself across the hands of
the children I haven’t held yet.
They’ll follow the cat, just like we did,
sister sister sister brother,
around the yard I can’t touch yet.
Home will be on the belly of a cat
who will make home in
the home I don’t have yet.
Pennsylvania will stay pressed into my lap
on days when I think that there
might just be
a lawn
four children
and a wrap-around porch
waiting outside my window.
Published by Pennsylvania Bards Southeast Poetry Review Fall 2019
Simran Singh Jain 