Illustration by Priyanka Paul
Yusra Amjad is a Pushcart-nominated poet and comedian from Lahore, Pakistan. She completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College on a Fulbright Scholarship, and her work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Crossed Genres, The Noble Gas Quarterly, L’Ephemere Review, Rising Phoenix Press, The Aleph Review, and others. She is currently working on her first poetry manuscript, Sometimes I Imagine My Country Is Mine.
2018
even though no one
can quite name it
everyone knows
that something
is monstrously missing from me
like a limb
or a fingernail:
i’ll tell you
(please stop trying to guess)
it’s fear.
that is what evaporated from me the night
my father’s soul evaporated from this city
overnight, I had nothing left
to be afraid of.
and that’s a grief
no one prepares you for
that's a funeral no one attends
they just know that something is wrong
when something so brittle walks so brazen
they just whisper behind your back
what kind of amputation could make
such a pretty girl so grotesque?
2003
You don’t know anyone until you know
what they are afraid of.
It wasn’t the first time I saw my father cry.
the moon was full. the rooftop a small ocean of silvery brick.
it was the first time he cried to me.
mujhe kabhi chor kar na jana
I was ten. I didn’t comfort him.
a fact that he reminded himself of more than once in the years to come,
and felt vindicated by.
there is no way for me to know this,
but i know it anyway.
and that was the whole problem, up on that roof.
I was born knowing him.
that was the first time a man told me what i already knew
and expected me to thank him.
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READAfter going missing for three months, Lisa, Suddenly appears at my midnight window. “I have an idea. A very bad idea” She whispers through the bars. I, both waking and dreaming Forgot to ask the important questions. “What? Tell me”.Bad Idea
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READ
Your refusal might enrage the master. He might abuse you, and call you a parasite for refusing to do any work after eagerly swallowing the food last night. Become even more determined. Sit tight.Wild Grass
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READI wake up on somedays In houses with patched walls And a bucket with water in the middle of nowhere On beds with no sheets And stamped up cockroaches at the edge of the bed My hand’s in a pile of ash And my glasses are lost in someone else’s hair I smell smoke and hear snores The only clean thing in the room is a gleaming red guitarFriends and Their Homes
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READWe hugged each other tightly and quickly let go. With no hope of seeing each other we cried, “Hope to see you soon.”A Journey to Kandahar