ISBN: 978-1-915108-28-9
Publication Date: 26 June 2025
98 Pages
from Viscera: Blood Fragments
III.
You learnt the word eviscerate when you first glanced
human viscera. A man lay dying but not all dead outside
the hospital, Christ bled on the wall, as the man’s arm
convulsed and swung off the stretcher like a rope over a well.
A head wet with blood bisected by nature’s knife.
Brains and bilge flowered on,
a body near-docked by the shore for Charon.
Contretemps at a construction site, a phrase you saw
at the back of your mind—“haemic disaster”, words
sloped downward, dripped crimson and doctors
with their all seeing eye, medical and weary
seemed to have only one way to see what I saw—
“we were told such cases mattered little”,
they had declared couples dead before, lodged them
as injuries by suicide in reports, when it was well
and clear that a village had conspired to hang
the two off a tree—these strange fruits of the east.
Ours are not the shores of Ilium, love is not
free. Turning to us now, the doctor asked
“Do you send an entire dwelling to the gallows
for the death of two?” by which he meant
a good citizen can’t always be good, or true.
So let the grief of a devastated conscience
turn them into Christ,
so let them suffer, so let them die.
*
Medha Singh’s poems deal with grief, absence, love and loss, often engaging with the concrete and small as a funnel for the larger ideas that govern us. Her work relies on image and music more than movement and action, which is really a way of thinking of identity and place as rooted in one’s experience of language – the sounds inside the voice of your mother, the words on pages of school books – all have a way of affecting the internal music of our everyday experience. Quotidian and intimate, Afterbody speaks of what survives us: it is the body’s secret laid bare. Singh’s style is unashamedly modernist and blends deft wit with seriousness of purpose. She builds a primordial homeland from the shifting tectonic plates of memory and the spaces we occupy.
“Gorgeous, poignant, beautifully evocative and strange, masterfully subtle, yet poetically exhilarating… Afterbody will properly announce Singh as one of the most notable emerging poets in Scotland.” —Alan Gillis
“Medha’s work is honed and stylistically assured and informed by the wide range of her reading across literature, cultural theory and philosophy. And yet, her poetry is never mannered and always, as Henri Cole says – as all good poetry must be – ‘dipped in the oil of human feeling’. Afterbody is stark, spiky, discursive, as Medha never allows grief in her poems to become an end in itself and instead triangulates grief as a battleground and elegy as a ruined field for self-interrogation and reckoning with the dead, and more than a site to simply erect a memorial.” —Rohan Chhetri
Afterbody by Medha Singh
Another Life
I’m writing love on a napkin
as mourners gather on a mound
for the disgraced dead, still
in grave-clothes underfoot—
suddenly, slow pianos sing
in air, the shifting earth
moving its cadavers to an ache
in the ocean. Here they are, the wretched
reborn as willows, contorted into pains
they don’t recognize. Bad men become trees.
The earth forgives them, as do I. They begin
to give. The wicked also dream
of love. They know darkness overhead
means night before and night behind, yet drops
of starlight have shot through earth’s evening;
overhead, gingkoes have flared
against sun. Evening over tarmac, evening
beneath lorries, where dogs huddle
for warmth, and for miles on end
the quiet noise of town. At the end
of the last mile, me, pouring this syrup
on a napkin. Things I can’t say yet:
Oh, pianos. Oh, love. How we begin
to open under black water.*
Rewilding
Ecstasy, I was told
is to lie outside oneself
the way we think of gardens
being the only way the earth shakes
awake from its taupe dream and enters
world into verdure, or the way invisible
things become apparent in visible things,
the wind undulates in wheat,
light flickers along stones under running water.
Now, look at the life with bones and words, small
but heavy sad, with all its fine writing
by the refined, consummate and dead.
All I want in the anxiety and aimlessness
of world and ecstasy is the courage of gardens
that endure the quiver of time. The kind
that could make me stand through
the cremation of a child in snow, where
there is none to attend,
but a blanket flowing along my spine.Note: "heavy sad" is borrowed from the Dream Songs of John Berryman.
Medha Singh is a poet from Delhi, based in Edinburgh. She is a winner of the New Writers Award 2023 (Scottish Book Trust). Her work of translation I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters from S.H. Raza was published in 2020 through The Raza Foundation, in collaboration with Art Vadehra. Her poems appear in Irish Pages, Almost Island, 3:AM, The Dark Horse, Bad Lilies, Interpret, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Indian Quarterly, The Robert Graves Review among numerous others. Her work has been anthologized in Singing in the Dark (Penguin, 2020), The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (Hachette, 2021), Contemporary Indian Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi, 2020), Best Indian Poetry 2018 (RLFPA editions), Divining Dante (Recent Work Press, 2021), Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen Press, 2022); Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Penguin Random House, 2022); The Best Asian Poetry (Kitaab, 2022).
Medha was longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Awards (India) in 2019 and 2020. She took her MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work has been translated into Hindi, Spanish and French. She is editor-at-large at Pen and Anvil Press, Boston.