Two Poems by Jayant Kashyap

On meaning to leave

“We trashed the fuck out of this place.”

— Jordan Alejandro Rivera, There are microplastics in the fish

This is what we’re supposed to mention when an extraterrestrial intending to stay on this planet asks us, the inhabitants of this trashed-out place. We say we trash—we trashed the fuck—that’s what we did—we trashed the fuck out of this place like all it was supposed to be was to be filled with black single-use garbage bags and plastic garbage cans. When we were born, there was so much green and there were so many colours as if the earth were painting itself into happiness, and now it looks like vomit and shit coming out of an unimaginable number of sores from this earth. What did you make of this place? when someone asks us so, we tell them we trashed the fuck out of this place—and we intend to soon relocate.

From the loft

This island is understood
to dissolve in water at the edge of itself.
People often visit to notice, and to take pictures
of themselves with a small blue pebble in a hand.
I’m not writing to you from here—
here the words are taken with water
and you cannot write words like sand or soil
or paper without adjectives or as different words entirely.
Like wet sand or mud or paper boat.
Notice how water improves even words,
changes a thing into something else—notice how this island
dissolves in water but never disappears;
sometimes the white foam at the mouth of the river
(sometimes the white foam
at the sides of the island) reflects sunlight.
At other times, the water is clean
like rain—or like a god’s palm that rests
on the back of a squirrel, leaving it with a soft warm
touch—like the evenings that are defined
by the parting of the sun.

Jayant Kashyap’s third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024, and he received a Toto Award in 2025.