‘Pyre’ first appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine’s 54th issue, in April 2023, and was praised for “an immersive experience.” It later appeared, in a slightly different form, in Kashyap’s New Poets Prize-winning third pamphlet Notes on Burials (smith|doorstop, 2025).

The poem has Meg Dunley’s post from X (formerly Twitter) as epigraph: “Do birds always fly with purpose or also just for fun[?]”