The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The End is Not Apocalypse by Tanya JADE VINE Singh

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Solstice Black, is from The End is Not Apocalypse by Another Morning Where Everyone Tells me I'm Dead by Tanya JADE VINE Singh, released by Yavanika Press in 2021.

Content warning for genocide, death, and violence.

I have felt love before so I recognise the absence of it

“My neighbours still make fun of how scared I used to be in those early days. I used to count my children every night. One day, one of my sons was missing and I came out crying on the streets, only to realise he had gone off to the neighbours,” says Attar Kaur.

– Niha Masih, 1984 anti-Sikh riots: Time doesn’t heal the pain. Ask Attar Kaur

At night, the quiet rubbed. It ached so full of ghosts, bodies scattered like crumbs. Your dead friends find you in the middle of nowhere. You put your hands where you were last seen and you disappear. In the thick of the fog, stinging, you sing with your mouth closed. Remember the god of ruins. Remember your bed covered in fault lines, the mirror framed with dirty golden. You never spell death but you mean it every time. Bastards, they’re all bastards, the rioters say. In the afternoon you find a thick skull on the street. So, naturally, you pick it up and bring it home.

Tanya JADE VINE Singh (it/its) is a queer, transgender/agender anarchist, poet, essayist, and teaching artist from Chandigarh, India. It is the author of Heaven is Only a Part of Our Body Where All the Sickness Resides (Ghost City Press, 2018) and The End Is Not Apocalypse But Another Morning Where Everyone Tells Me I’m Dead (Yavanika Press, 2021). Its work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Polyphony H.S, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Student Contest, among other places. It is deeply inspired by the politics of indispensability.

Solstice Black (she/they) is a queer poet and novelist living in the Pacific Northwest. They are currently undertaking a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua, The Fantastic Other, and A Forest of Words, among others. They hope to pursue an MFA in creative writing and a BFA in visual art in the next few years. Her cat is both her greatest joy and torment.