Becoming
by Kashvi Chandok
I split my heart open
and worry,
For grief spills out of me
And rests in my bathroom mirror;
Unaware—
Like a hotel guest in a lobby,
Humming an old foreign wound.
What does she know
Of the rippling of my elbow and conditioned
Breathing
Pushing through this skin
Of unsweetened milk
And feigning tremors in place of bones.
But I can see her take shape,
And shift around the edges of my body
Like chewed grass peddling around naked feet,
And witnessed
Grief ceasing to be a noun—
Swiftly becoming a verb.
Moving along the lining of my skin.
Kashvi Chandok is a Literature student from Delhi, India. On days when she is not writing, you can find her sipping coffee and admiring the works of Kafka and Sartre. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in evergreen poetry journal, Rust and Moth literary journal, and dreams walking amongst others. She is the EIC fiction of a literary journal called The Remnant Archive.