Associate editor Heath Joseph Wooten on this week’s bonus poem: Ashish Kumar Singh’s “Appreciation” is brilliant. Its quiet lines guide readers through a surprising meditation to a moment of release simultaneously subtle and disarming. It’s not hard to see the beauty in this poem if you, as Singh suggests, look.

Appreciation

Look, beauty is everywhere.

All you need is to open your eyes.

When I kneel in front of a man

with my teeth holding him midway,

I’m sure I must look from above

like a devotee deep in his prayers.

And isn’t beauty like a shadow

that follows a body?

It’s only there if you pay attention

otherwise it just becomes

another flower on a sidewalk.

That’s why I have started seeing

things the way a connoisseur looks

at a painting or like a mouth

in the process of saying something

meaningful. And now I’m in awe

when I see a leaf drop from a tree

and float in the wind

because what I’m witnessing is hands

that are invisible, hands that rock it

as if a child, to sleep. Sometimes

beauty becomes necessary.

Beauty becomes a cure for things

shameful. A man comes and refuses

to look beneath the eyes looking up,

waiting to be told that he did good.

Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer poet from India with a Master’s degree in English Literature. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Trampset, Foglifter, Banshee, Channel Magazine, The Bombay Literary Magazine and elsewhere. He serves as an editorial assistant at Visual Verse, poetry editor at Indigo Literary Journal and reads for ANMLY.

If you would like to show appreciation for the author’s work, you can send tips via PayPal: www.paypal.me/ashishstjude