Kashya Creates

Newer poems (still silly)

DEEP END

When I was four, swim lessons were chaos.
We were small and loud and uncoordinated,
arms slapping water like we were fighting it.
There was no rhythm, no form.
Just noise and splashing and parents filming from plastic chairs.

I didn’t learn to swim.

At eight, I tried again.
Group class.
I cared more about doing underwater summersaults
and making the girls next to me laugh
than I cared about technique.
We compared goggles and held our breath
to see who could last longer.
The water felt like a game.

I still didn’t learn to swim.

At ten, it changed.

They said he was the best instructor they had.
One-on-one lessons.
Midday, when the pool was mostly empty.

The deep end was ten feet.
He would take me there
because that’s where you “really learn.”

I couldn’t touch the bottom.
I couldn’t reach the wall.
If I let go of him, I would sink.

His hands stayed longer than they needed to.
At first it was subtle,
a correction that lingered,
a grip that didn’t release when it should have.

Then it wasn’t subtle.

The deep end is quiet in a different way.
Your body is already tense
from trying not to swallow water.
Your mind calculates distance.
Your lungs measure seconds.

I remember thinking:
if I push him away, I will drown.

So I didn’t.

That summer I learned
how to stay still,
how to get through forty-five minutes
without making it worse.

I did not learn to swim.

When I was thirteen,
I was sent back to him
because I still couldn’t swim
and he was supposedly the best.

He didn’t touch me then.
I was taller.
Old enough to look less manageable.

But the nine-year-old girls
who had their lesson after mine,
I could see it in the way they stood
at the edge of the pool.
Too stiff.
Too quiet.

There’s a look you recognize
once you’ve worn it.

I never learned how to swim.

Years later, the news starts surfacing names.
Men who moved in circles of wealth and power.
Files released.
Arguments about what counts,
what qualifies,
what can be proven.

People talk about logistics and flight manifests
like they’re discussing travel itineraries.

And I keep thinking about the deep end.
About how power works the same way water does
when you’re small.

You can’t touch the bottom.
You can’t reach the wall.
You depend on the very thing
that can hurt you.

What happened to me wasn’t part of a global ring.
There are no sealed court documents with my name.
Just a pool in the middle of the day
and a man people trusted.

But the architecture is familiar.
Authority.
Access.
Silence.
Reputation protecting itself.

For years, the memory felt like something I should minimize.
It wasn’t violent enough.
It wasn’t dramatic enough.
It didn’t “ruin” my life in a visible way.

I just never learned to swim.

But trauma doesn’t measure itself by headlines.
It measures itself by the way your body reacts
to hands at your waist in a crowded room.
By how quickly your chest tightens
when you can’t see the bottom of something.

I am the same age now as he was when he taught me.

And I am learning something I didn’t learn in that pool:
that speaking does not make you drown.
That shame is not a life vest.

I still don’t love the deep end.
I still check exits.
I still feel my body brace in certain situations.

But I am not clinging to anyone to survive anymore.

The world is finally having conversations
about power and exploitation and what we overlook
when someone is called “the best.”

I am having my own conversations too.
With myself.
With people I trust.

I am naming what happened
without shrinking it
and without inflating it.

I did not learn to swim.
But I am learning how to stand in water
without losing myself.

This is not a poem about gardening

Plant the seed.
No, not like that—
Push until the dirt feels
like it might bite you back.

Stop.
Do you feel that?
The soil grinning under your nails?

Somewhere beneath this chaos,
a root is plotting.
It curls,
drags itself deeper.

(Does this feel familiar yet?)

The stem doesn’t grow;
it tears.
It breaks the surface gasping.
Leaves arrive too early,
soft and trembling.
They burn, but they stay.

Look at your hands:
raw, stubborn,
learning the shape of care.
Do they remind you of someone?

(You’re still asking what this is about.)

The fruit will come.
One day,
proof,
bite into it and taste everything:
the nights you doubted,
the mornings you didn’t stop.
It will taste like all the things
you couldn’t say.
It will taste like work.

(It will taste like love)

This isn’t about the seed,
not really.
It never needed someone to believe in it.
It grows
because it must.

And so do you.

Published in Scope Literary Magazine 2025

Pink Lemonade ICE CREAM

Have you ever tasted happiness?” she asked,
her voice a trembling hymn.
“Pink lemonade ice cream—it’s better than church.”
Her eyes lit up,
two shards of sunlight cutting through the haze of years.
She sat there, seventy-seven and defiant,
armed with only a spoon and stories that
no one had long enough to hear.

Her world was small:
a sagging porch,
a radio that only caught static,
and the hum of a freezer
filled with sweets.
She lived alone, tucked away
in the shadow of east Texas pines,
but she invited me into her kingdom:
crosswords spread like maps on her table,
stories of long-gone children
dangling in the still air.

We talked about everything:
her boys, the ones she raised
on casseroles and borrowed dimes,
the dog she lost last winter,
the quiet that pressed in
when the house became just her.

“Do you ever just listen to the quiet?” she asked me once.
I didn’t know how to tell her
it scared me too.

In her pauses,
I gathered the pieces she didn’t say.
Her restless nights,
the storm clouds of her mind.

Her sadness wasn’t loud;
it lingered like smoke,
curling at the edges of her days.
Her anxiety hummed beneath her skin,
a faint electric buzz.
But she never let it steal her ice cream.

When her doctor called her name,
I lingered,
listening to the ghost of her laughter
settle in the air.

And when I left that day,
I bought myself a tub of pink lemonade ice cream.
I wanted to know what hope tasted like
on a spoon.

Published in Scope Literary Magazine 2025

Between Seasons

I was searching for autumn under the blaze of summer skies,
But the warmth I craved wasn’t in the sun’s scorch.
It wasn’t in the sticky embrace of a sultry afternoon,
Or the way my shorts clung, just a little too snug—
my bikini never settling quite right on my skin.

I longed for the dance of rust-red leaves,
For the soft whispers of autumn’s breath in the air,
A sweater wrapped around me, cocooning against the chill,
Where warmth wasn’t a given, but something you held close.
I yearned to feel sunlight kiss me in the midst of a cool breeze,
To feel the season shift, gently, like finding you.

Tundra

I always await the fervent kiss of Sol’s embrace;

the sole force that melts the frozen lake’s grace.

A liquid jewel, in summer’s warmth it winks.

golden rays and sapphire firmament

their joyful union, a dappled haven

The air is alive,

a symphony of life in summer.

But when the argent chariot of frost descends,

My lake is engulfed in a fragile, icy light.

silence reigns

time is paused

I sit there and I wait for the night to pass,

longing for the thaw that will set my lake free,

while I am trapped in a tundra’s embrace.

silly little OLD POEMS I WROTE

bIRDIE

Her eyes

save me

Art, the saviour,

he comes in so many forms

mind, body, soul, expression

he tears through your deepest thoughts

forcing you to thrust them out

for if you don’t

you can’t be saved

by Art, the saviour

CRAZY weather WE’RE HAVING

She sits there. Alone?

Tuning into the mindless chatter that surrounds her.

She smiles. She giggles. While, the darkness usurps her mind.

The worst of it all whispers sweet nothings in her ear, beckoning her to the edge.

She looks over. If she leans anymore, she will tumble down with no way back up.

She teters, but edges away, seals it away, she’ll return to it another day.

For now, all she can do is tune back into the mindless chatter and join in.