Kashiana Singh is a management professional by job classification and a work practitioner by personal preference. Kashiana’s TEDx talk was dedicated to Work as Worship. Her poetry collection, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. She dips into very vulnerable and personal contexts but also explores the shifting tectonic plates of the world around her.

Kashiana has shared her poetry on a couple of Rattle Open Mic episodes and been on Songs of Selah in conversation with Scott Thomas Outlar.

She is from India, now lives in Chicago. She is a regular contributor to different poetry platforms like Poets Reading the News, Rattle Open Mic, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, TurnPike Magazine, Dissident Voice, Feminine Collective, OnMogul, Literary Yard, Narrow Mag, Modern Literature, SikhNet, Women’s Web, Tuck Magazine, Spillwords. She is in the process of gathering her second collection of poems.

A room with a view – in Boisie

In Boisie, a still panorama
Looks into me, as I too look
At the man in attentive pose
Looking tenderly at nothing
I am astonished, how unfazed
They all stand, endless to God
A physicality, in performance
Teasing me, out of a fatigue
I am breathing, but I now hold
Each breath, in a reverence
I feel a purple sky, fall out and
into this cross legged lap of
mountains, as they look somber
at the brimming river snake below

learning to meditate

like squirrels when they hold their nuts
nibbling with peculiar intent, till it cracks
yet in our arrogance we call our absent moments
our drifting squirrel moments

like trees who unseeing infuse honey in
every cell with compassion, into existence
yet in our exasperation we take upon
ourselves, to be saviours of environment

like ripples that gather memory dazzling
fire flies fluttering as water moves, shapes
yet in our ignorance we pretend, as if
oceanography, will solve deep mystery

like ashes easing into an earth, tiniest
of blessings dust to dust, ether to ether
yet in our hyphenated templates, we list
cadavers, with markings of religions