Most poems about envy point at someone else. akchiis points inward. The speaker of "kind envy" isn't resentful of a rival. She is ashamed of the resentment itself, and the whole poem turns on the gap between the person she wants to be and the one she finds inside her.
The opening wish is almost childlike: a heart "filled with / milk and cookies." It is a picture of kindness as something warm, domestic and edible, the sort of thing offered at a kitchen table. Against it, the poem sets "the violent commotion of green / envy swirling in the vortex / of a confused cavity." The heart is no longer a cozy container but a hollow, a "cavity" that suggests both an empty space and decay. The phrase "green envy" borrows the old idiom, but the verbs ("swirling," "vortex") give the colour real physical force.
The first stanza builds one extended water image. The speaker feels around in the dark for "that one golden drain plug," as if the heart were a flooded bath and the right answer a small object she could pull to let the feeling drain away. The detail that makes it painful is the next line: "the feeling never reaches my fingers." The cure is close enough to imagine and too far to touch. The stanza ends with "leaving me to drown, on my own," and the pause before "on my own" slows the line down so that loneliness gets the last word.
In the second stanza, the water becomes noise, then insects. "Static fills my head" is the sound of a mind that can't think clearly, and it hands over to "a / never-ending swarm of bees." Bees are a clever choice because they carry two ideas at once: stinging and sweetness. The speaker is left "bruised and weary," yet she is also "hive and carrier" of "overly sweet nectar." She is both the place where the feeling is stored and the creature that keeps delivering it. The phrase "storing and hoarding" makes envy sound like a habit of collecting, a private stockpile that grows until she can no longer "see the light of day." One small oddity is that the swarm clouds "its prey," while the speaker seems to be the one hunted. The grammar blurs who is attacker and who is victim, which suits a poem about a feeling that is both done to her and done by her.
The sweetness is the most interesting turn. The poem began by wishing for milk and cookies, a wholesome kind of sugar. By the end, sugar has gone wrong: "overly sweet," then "the diabetic elixir of the green apple of eden." The allusion points to the forbidden fruit and the fall, but the image is deliberately confused, since a green apple is sour and the elixir is sickly sweet. That mix suits envy, which looks tempting and leaves a bad taste. There is another paradox in the "parched mouth." After a whole stanza of drowning, the speaker is thirsty, as though envy can flood you and still leave you wanting more.
The last line gives the poem its idea: "i succumb / to my own humanity." It can be read as defeat, a surrender to the feeling she hoped to rise above. It can also be read as acceptance, because the Eden reference suggests envy is not a freakish flaw but part of being human. The poem doesn't settle between the two, and I think that is its honesty. The title shares the ambiguity. "Kind envy" can mean a kind of envy, or an envy that is somehow kind, and the poem never quite says which, as if the speaker can't decide whether the two words are allowed to sit together.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme. It is written entirely in lowercase, and its two stanzas, of ten and twelve lines, are held together by commas rather than full stops. Sentences run on across line breaks, the way a spiralling thought does. Sound does some of the work that rhyme might have done: the hard "c" and "v" sounds in "violent commotion" and "confused cavity" make the line rattle.
What makes "kind envy" worth reading is that it refuses to make envy glamorous or villainous. It describes the small, sticky shame of feeling something you wish you didn't, and it ends by admitting that the feeling belongs to the speaker.