Ammara Younas
Summer 2025 | Poetry
self-portrait as my father undying
when i woke up i was in an empty museum
the sky was bulbless & an impossible forest grew around me
like an overripe mouth with language made into an animal
like stillbirth on a stretcher,
its jaw remembering what its mouth couldn't: the squirm of breasts
the jazz dance of a mother's milk the whiteness the opening distance
someone had warned me that once one's a machine everything can be its dirt mother
no one told me what it'd be like as a dead man
maybe it's the same or the complete opposite
every once in a while all prayers dissolve like white noise
in god's hungry memory
so if i can be finally honest will it undo my offenses?
will it twist the head of helianthus towards the sweat-ghost of a remembered sun?
will it unname me
& name me again with a name that doesn't bruise that woman's tongue?
outside, poems bubbled on the surface but i was going blind
the dream-film on my eyes fizzled like TV static
fireworks at funeral
i missed my mother
& above all, the woman who told me she loved me after i hit her
her eyes: trampoline of an entire song swinging my dead body into the mouth
of a child's sky: homecoming
Ammara Younas is a poet and writer from Gujranwala, Pakistan. Her work has found a home in spaces like Rattle, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Verse Daily, ONLY POEMS, Tahoma Literary Review, Gather, The Shore, BRUISER, The Marrow Poetry, Tasavvur, wildscape. literary journal, Gabby & Min's Literary Review, The Imagist, Small World City, Lakeer, and Resonance. She has worked as a prose & poetry editor at Subtext Literary Magazine.