"The Concept of Beauty" by Umamah Farooq

I have spent a lifetime trying to 
understand the concept of beauty
without staring into a looking glass
only to find hate dressed in black,
mourning because it had to inhabit
a body that sometimes forgets 
to look at itself in the light and feel alive.

No one taught me how to be beautiful 
so, I think that means I'm not and there
really is no point trying to dig up 
the remains of something that
never even existed in the first place.
Tell me how do you outrun the demon
that only exists in your shadow
or behind a reflection.

Don't tell me my brown skin reminds 
you of brewing coffee because I hate 
coffee it makes me gag and I cannot 
spend another day washing the bitter
taste from my tongue with soap that 
burns like acid in a mouth forced
to unlearn the way it smiles because 
my crooked front teeth don’t deserve
an audience.

My origin story is nothing but another
version of myself yearning to be noticed
and there are only so many ways one 
can shrink themselves to occupy
the loneliest corner of the universe until
it decides to imprison you there
and the only poems I write about myself
turn into eulogies and apology notes.
Maybe I just need to accept that the world
doesn't remember girls that look like me.

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Umamah Farooq (Instagram handle @_i.writes_) is a seventeen-year-old from Pakistan.