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Kneading

Jayant Kashyap

I’m in the kitchen kneading dough.


How do things

that do not speak complain when they


(mistakenly) think they are harassed?


Like grains—say wheat

grains—ripped off from what covers them


since you don’t know when

and—let’s say—someone kneads


dough to make what dough is kneaded for.


Sometimes to make black bread

I knead it tough

as gristle


as we make love on the kitchen table;

we bolt / unbolt

at our convenience;


but what of the things that do not speak

things we use in the midst


of our bouts of pleasure—


how will they complain

(if they will) when at any moment


there’s no one here?


Jayant Kashyap’s third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, has won the 2024 New Poets Prize, judged by Holly Hopkins, and organised by the Poetry Business, and will be published by smith|doorstop in 2025. His poems appear in POETRY, Denver Quarterly, Magma, Arc, Acumen, The North, and Poetry Wales.

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