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.

The end of the body is where it begins

Frenzied mobs of young Hindu thugs, thirsting for revenge, burned Sikh-owned stores to the ground, dragged Sikhs out of their homes, cars and trains, then clubbed them to death or set them aflame before raging off in search of other victims.

– Simran Jeet Singh, It’s Time India Accept Responsibility for Its 1984Sikh Genocide

In 1984, the attackers had set Sikh homes, shops and gurdwaras on fire. One of the most brutal tactics was to “garland” Sikh men with tyres and set them alight.

– Sonia Sarkar, From 1984 to 2020: A tale of two “riots“

Our names breathe what we cannot. It takes the whole dawn to make ruin of a house, walls swept in, photos hung in purple lights. A child brings chestnuts in time for lunch and we all eat together, the sun, a golden yolk pulled from the sky. I wanted something to bite on, anything to forget the histories of blood, blue scavenge, the copper moon. I watch ghosts walk past the china, their eyes full of earthly longing. I laugh till I cannot laugh anymore. Ours is a lineage of short summers spent worshiping small gods, contractual and ceremonious. We are children of bone and blood; we are married to dirt before we’re even born.

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.