Details |
Sumreen Younas Poem
After you left,
I found the jar on the kitchen shelf,
lid gone,
its mouth taking in the afternoon.
At four, the window
set a square of sun inside it.
For twenty minutes
the glass looked occupied.
I began keeping that hour clear.
I left the blinds half-open,
moved the chair out of its path,
turned the jar a finger-width
as the sun shifted lower.
Nothing else in the room
received such care.
Soon, I stopped asking
what the jar could keep.
It held only my attention
until the light moved on.
Still, I washed it.
Still, I returned it to the same mark
on the sill.
By winter,
clouds began arriving before I did.
The jar showed me the room
bent through its empty walls:
the table,
the cold tap,
my own hand passing behind the glass.
I put it back on the highest shelf
and stopped waiting for four.
Weeks later, at dusk,
I saw the jar again.
The room had darkened inside it
before it darkened around me.
For once,
I left it where it was
and watched nothing disappear.
Copyright © Sumreen Younas | Year Posted 2026
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Details |
Sumreen Younas Poem
By twenty-five, she had stopped saying favorite.
Not favorite song.
Not favorite place.
Not favorite person.
She had begun to suspect
that life listened
when she loved something aloud.
The friend who saved her the window seat
learned to pass her without slowing.
A number she once knew by heart
became one she taught herself not to call.
Soon she stopped pointing
at anything she wanted to keep.
When people hurt her,
she was slow at cruelty.
The right sentence always came later,
when she no longer wanted to use it.
Theirs came home with her anyway.
Years did not make her harder.
They made every edge easier to feel.
So she learned smaller happiness:
the one unbroken biscuit in the packet,
winter sun on the corner of her bed,
tea still warm when she remembered to drink it.
Then someone kept asking what she liked.
“What is your favorite thing?”
She laughed the first few times.
One evening,
the word came close enough to say.
She nearly said his name.
He once told her,
“I like that you care this much.”
Months later:
“Do you have to care about everything?”
She remembered both.
That night she typed an answer,
deleted it,
and turned the phone face down.
Months passed.
She bought a cheap notebook.
On the first page:
FAVORITE THINGS
She let the ink dry.
Then wrote:
the first dark circle
rain makes in courtyard dust
She closed the notebook.
The rain was gone by evening.
She did not cross it out.
Copyright © Sumreen Younas | Year Posted 2026
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