Campfire Pop
The hot medium of flames smacks
upward, whacks sheer eyes
with a stencil of blue and green.
The hot medium of flames smacks
upward, whacks sheer eyes
with a stencil of blue and green.
There is a foreigner
on this shore.
From foreign lands, with
Foreign hands,
Knocking at my door.
4 pm sunlight carves golden frames on cream walls
a city, blue glass and white birds,
dances beyond
On my sixteenth birthday, I ask my mother if I can get a tattoo like hers on my wrist. Raising an eyebrow at me, she responds back, like she’s done, a thousand times before,
It’s not a tattoo, she says.
With the end of 2019 came lists and awards from media outlets about the past ten years in review. Among these was the declaration by The New Republic that Rupi Kaur was their writer of the decade. Kaur, at only twenty-seven years old, is known as an “Instapoet,” and owes much of her success to her highly popular Instagram account where she publishes short poems accompanied by distinct line drawings. Kaur currently has 3.9 million followers, and her posts alternate between coloured photos—often of Kaur herself—and poems made up of black text on a white background. Social media poetry tends to follow a similar structure: aesthetic, brief, and easily digestible.