R. KUMRA

R. Kumra is the winner of the 2026 Subnivean Poetry Award selected by Chen Chen. He was the winner of the 2026 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and 2026 Annie Dillard Non-Fiction Award and Finalist for the 2026 Tobias Wolff Fiction Award. Inhale was first written on receipt paper and napkins in the break room of a New Jersey warehouse, then retyped into a secondhand laptop missing the letter Q. He did not own a website. He did not teach. For years he lived with his mother, who never read his work but told everyone at Jummah her son was a writer. She was correct. Website: https://inhale.ink/

In these poems a compact’s mirror distorts the speaker’s face like “Escher’s sphere”; then water is “tea-dark” and then “dimple[d]” by mouths “nibbling at light / like a trail of bread”; and finally, paper is something to “believe in.” One can’t help but believe in these poems, gladly, completely. These poems are full of gorgeous imagery and glorious music—and crucially, literary technique is always in service of the heart, one deeply attuned to that which usually goes unnoticed, unpoemed. In other words, the “sweetness [that’s] a kind of evidence / nobody bothered to collect.” I thank this poet for bothering, for collecting such sweetness and surprise, all this tenderness.

Chen Chen

2026 Subnivean Poetry Award Final Judge

THE COMPACT

The compact she'd carried thirty years in the same split leather case, its brass back worn by her thumb's absent-minded circling, the hinge gone soft, the click barely a click—her thumb pressing its crescent while I, across the room, held a penlight to a pupil in the midst of shrinkage, her shape behind the patient's shoulder barely there, then clicked the oximeter onto a fingertip and waited for the pulse to register, my hand tapping the chart's edge, counting someone else's beats. I've seen it a hundred times in clinic. I’ve seen that fixed repetitive motor pattern, and you flag it, and you move on to someone else's wife. Her glasses tucked into her bra strap, her lipstick worn to a nub she'd twist open and close. Of the compact, she could not, toward the end, find her own face in it. She'd turn that compact over in her hands the way she'd started turning everything, as if she'd been told what she held was hers but never quite believed it. When she held it to her face—and this you could see, you could see it in her face—she knew something was wrong with the glass. She'd tilt it, adjust the angle, troubleshooting an instrument, not a face. Is this mine? she asked me once. Holding it. I said yes. I was wrong about what she was asking. I wrote her name for her on a card and taped it to the hallway mirror. Left her slippers at the foot of the bed the way she'd left them forty years, toes pointing outward. What I thought might help didn’t.  

The compact I keep in the bedside drawer. I know it by touch the way I know a sternum under my palm—the cracked case, the cool weight of it, its hinge stiff, its click gone. I still listen for the click. Its mirror holds the ceiling now, a surface she never confused with a face. When I open it, there I am—caught in the glass she'd searched and searched, my features warped the way Escher's sphere warps the room it was asked to hold, faithfully, wrong—and I snap it shut.

RECLAMATION

Beside the right-of-way, my father

exhales Pall Mall and February—each

outbreath a receipt stamped invisible 

against my cheek. Old tipple squats

in corrugated ribs, downspouts rimed

with sulfate, vents to cough 

at the holler. A government placard:

RECLAMATION IN PROGRESS.

Another: NO TRESPASSING. 

(As if the pokeweed could read.) 

People swear a forest used to fill this—

an endless trilling, throat of wood

thrush, pulse of wren. Before that,

silence. Unmapped. Daddy says it, and

the claim stamps itself TRUE, some

notary 

embossing air. He says sang grew here

thick as eyelashes. Says this crick ran so

clean you might could count those darters'

ribs. I lick my teeth. 

I have nothing to compare it with. 

If I lean close to the ditchwater, 

tea-dark with acid mine seep, 

I can still smell roots rotting in

place, that sweet-sour fermentation 

of what won't leave. Sycamore leaves—

gray coins—tithe the mud. A garter

snake, pencil-thin, lies sutured between

them— the vein the mountain keeps 

dreaming back into its body. 

Even the granny we invent— 

hoe raised, apron the color 

of old mustard—could vanish

into foxtail and rumor, unfiled.

Daddy's hands: cracks threading

knuckles running seamish in the

holler's last chimney. Under each nail, a

moon of coal dust he called 

tolerable— 

I used to press my thumb into his

palm, feel the callus give—slightly, 

sphagnum after rain—and believed in reading a future 

where both of us would almost hold.

(Once, he cupped a stunned waxwing

against his sternum. Breathed on it.

Breathing moved its breast— 

or was that his trembling? 

Both, I guessed. It flew. 

We stood in the flying's aftermath, his

hands still cupped around the shape of

what had left.) 

Chub mouths dimple surface-film

of the settling pond, nibbling at

light like a trail of bread. Behind

them, rows of spruce lifting

identical 

needles do not point 

to anything. Strike that. 

What I'm calling forest 

I loved before I saw it. A mountain filed

under WANT. The reclamation bond was

the smallest the law would accept—a

form signed in the thinnest 

ink—then the company dissolved

like the sugar he stirs into his

thermos each morning, methodical,

quiet, sweetness a kind of evidence

nobody bothered to collect. 

Cattails—brown cigar-heads 

furred with frost—stand at our

settling pond's edge, a bodily border: 

cuticle, fontanelle, fence-line. On

ice-glazed mornings the cruelty

arrives in its simplicity: seep

persists, perfect and unconsenting, 

orange as the iodine he painted

across my scrapes, saying hush

now in a voice that meant: 

I know. 

To my right his shoulder,  

wind, whatever name 

you give to what steadies yourself

in its lean on you, nudges me up

the slag heap's bald crown. The

quiet up there—not peaceful, just

quit. 

I go willingly. 

I have practiced being led. 

He coughs— 

I note it the same as any noticing,

a house starting to lean: not

today, not yesterday, but

sigogglin now. His lungs: a

settling pond. 

His breath: that orange

trickle I call a crick. I want  

to say let me read your palm again.

Already he turns his back to the

wind, to shield a match 

from going out.

From here I can see the wound: 

benches where the mountain opened, gray

ponds, orange vein-paths, and past them, a

ridge still wearing its trees— 

ordinary, ordinary green. 

Downriver, the current winnows 

one leaf—sycamore, its brown

spread—toward this river's

mouth, toward reservoir, toward

town. 

I cannot claim it as evidence. 

He says stay— 

which means, in his mouth, 

both please and where we live.

CURRENT ADDRESS

Habibti, the bamya is sticking again. I scrape the pan with the spoon, the oil low, the gas low.  You asked for something that tastes like before. 

You bring your bread already torn in half. You say, Look, Mama—two pieces, already teaching me math. 

Your left shoe is missing again. I tie the other tighter and pretend that's enough.

Za'atar powders your mouth. The grit catches between my teeth, green and

stubborn. 

At the school where you learned to write your name they have set up a table and a stamp. They give us a number. I write 173 on your palm. Pockets tear, paper disappears. Your hand is the only place I know I'll find again. 

We sit on blue plastic chairs that stick to the backs of our legs. When you stand, the squares print themselves on your skin. The hallway smells of bleach and boiled lentils, and under my scarf my sweat turns to salt. A crying baby is lifted higher on a hip. The woman with the badge calls next. 

At our turn she slides the form toward me. CURRENT ADDRESS, it says, and the line beneath  is wide and empty as if it had never met a life. 

I want her to think I am easy. I want to be legible. I want my handwriting to

pass. I start to write ةمیخ . My pen makes the first curve when my hand stops. 

You watch my hand. You believe in paper. 

Bayt, I tell you. Say it. Bayt: house. Bayt: line. 

The generator stops mid-hum. My ears keep the sound for a beat, how my tongue keeps the aftertaste of za'atar. The ceiling fan quits. For a moment your face is only shadow. 

The zanāna is still above us, and my teeth answer it. 

I cross out ةمیخ and write bayt. I write what she can use, careful, as if careful could

help. Under the stairwell, third classroom on the right—where the okra smell comes

from. 

The stamp comes down hard. Temporary, she says. I hate how much I want that word to mean safe. 

Outside, in courtyard cement, ants lift crumbs bigger than their backs and drag them home.

You kneel and put your ear to the ground. You tell me they are talking. I believe you. I want to.

On the walk back you ask for the last piece of bread. I give it to you. My fingers smell like  bamya and ink. 

You chew. The grit wakes you up. You say bayt again, quieter, and look around once.

I fold the paper and put it in my pocket. Your palm is still marked 173. Allah yihmik,

I whisper. You take my hand, and we walk on.

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