Spoons Are Also Mirrors & Mother Tongues & Grief Is A Feather

Spoons Are Also Mirrors

Dissatisfactory, ugly.

The mirror should've never been made,

Our eager eyes become sinister.

Even my reflection in your eyes

Is warped, distorted. 

I feel like a picture without a frame

When I see myself looking back at me.

So deeply unmoored, that reality

Shifts like sand. It is uncanny to see myself

Smile, frown, cry. This absurd similarity

Veers into the valley of verisimilitude. 

Spoons are also mirrors. So are the

Innumerable fracturings and redelegations

Of sand that

Shifts into glass, tinted in every colour

Except what the eye really sees. 

I can't escape what I see so clearly,

Fractals of myself leer in my periphery.

Mother Tongues

This is a feeling more akin to a prideless hurt than sorrow.

Strange, how my throat swells, my eyes burn. 

It’s like a glowing ball of molten lava is trapped in my throat.

The size of a lemon, a melon, a boulder?

It’s futile, it all feels the same. Farfar angrezi can’t help me now. 

My grief is unconsolable.

Grief Is A Feather

Grief is a feather with clumps of blood, forever stuck.

I’ve bleached the feather with the whites, beaten it alongside the carpet, 

But the blood is unrelenting. I’ve tried boiling the blood, 

Sticking the feather between the frozen peas and chips, no luck.

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Yusra Adeel (they/them) is a queer British-Pakistani poet fascinated by untangling perspectives beyond their own. Their work explores identity and grief (among other things) through various poetic forms. Currently an undergraduate student, they are learning to interrogate belonging and mourning as fundamentals of the human experience.