Neelam lay poised in death
like a bride arranged to be married with ash
talons stiff in midair worn
plume rumpled from the fall
hurled again and against
family portraits framed with glass
said she:
turn my feathers into quills
and write
to recyclerecyclere—
cycle my life
Kanwalroop Kaur Singh is an aspiring Sikh writer and activist-scholar. Her name means “form of a lotus” in Punjabi. Daughter of immigrants, she was born in California but her roots lie in both the Pakistan and India sides of modern-day Punjab. She was a recipient of the Yoshiko Uchida Prize in Writing at UC Berkeley, a participant in the VONA/Voices Writers Workshop, and has previously been published on Black Girl Dangerous. Currently, she is at work on a series of short stories.
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