Substitute
Ashish Kumar Singh
It’s winter, and my only comfort
lies in the lies I tell my mother.
When she asks where have I been,
I tell her With a friend, casting
every hand that ever touched me
in the same mold. Just the other night,
a man called me by a different name,
making me the love he wished for
but never had. What does it matter
whose face we kiss in the dark.
In maths, we were taught to substitute
what we wanted for something else—
a lesson I learned well. After dinner,
my mother kisses me, saying You look
starved, and oh, how I want to tell her
how right she is. The body, Mother,
never got what it wanted—only
what it could take.
About the writer
Photo by Ashish Kumar Singh
Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer Indian poet whose work has appeared in Passages North, Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Banshee and elsewhere. Currently, he serves as an editorial assistant at Visual Verse and a poetry reader at ANMLY.