nail polish

by ashish kumar singh

Desire was quieten by the unwanted shame
and the nail polish I bought stayed for another
week beneath the school books. The woman
selling them looked at me as if I hadn’t asked
for a product but stood soliciting sex like
young girls on Red Road do. When she asked
for what, I lied and said, it’s my sister’s
birthday. Though I would have liked to try
all the shades to see which suits my fingers
the most, like my mother does—
each brushstroke carefully measured, I did not.
In the end, I went for the red that shined with
star glitters. My sister, if she were to see it,
would’ve called it gaudy, red being the color
that screams desperation. When walking
all the way home, the bottle felt cold against
the palm in the pocket of my trousers and guilt
hot like the barrel of a gun pressed against
the lungs. Weeks passed and it remained
hidden like a stolen property until yesterday
when I skipped school, settled in a corner
of a park so far away it took almost an hour
to get there. Tell me, what is the most daring
thing a boy of 14 can do if not this—
stealing a moment to try to be someone else.
I opened the bottle and the smell
of my mother getting ready tingled my nose,
her one hand extended towards me as I held
a different bottle of the same colour,
ready to show her the artist in me while
the other near her maroon lips, blowing them
to dry. I laid down, my ten digits spread on
the green grass like ten red ladybirds, my face
getting kissed in blotches by the afternoon
sun. When getting late, I hurried, left
myself asleep on the ground and like an exile
finally returned home.   

about the author

Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer Indian poet whose work has appeared in Passages North, Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Banshee and elsewhere. Currently, he serves as an editorial assistant at Visual Verse and a poetry reader at ANMLY.