Afterthought

By Fiza Mahmud

This piece is called “Afterthought”. There is no true meaning behind it, but if you look closer, each paragraph is a different perspective. Common ideas one can come up with and seen in this piece regard a woman, delusions, and death. However, the woman can be seen as you, the reader. The woman can also be seen as the general mind, or soul. In the way that she writes this poem, the first stanza is through the eyes of a bystander, may it be an actual person or life itself. The second stanza is written through the perspective of a lover, or it could be the woman’s mind in third person. The final stanza is from the eyes of the woman herself, whose perspective is completely different compared to the others. The poet stresses how she writes in a way that multiple meanings can be derived from the work, but here, she explains how this poem is about the perspectives of a woman, whose non-solidified form of identity goes in search of herself. The references of death and caskets state that the woman pirouettes and jumps to her death, which is figurative since she is “leaping” to destroy her other selves/find her true identity. However, the poem doesn’t end. The vision of her free falling creates irony since all along, her true identity was indeed all of her different selves.

Fiza Mahmud is a 15 year old from Los Angeles, California. She is Bengali-American and currently lives in Arizona. She has been published twice by the Young American Poetry Digest for her creative writing work. She likes to jot down my thoughts in my free time. Mahumd’s signature style is multi-interpretive work, as shown in “Afterthought”. Being Asian has shaped her life “in ways [she] couldn’t even think to be possible” both positive and negatively. Fiza is onest about the difficulties being ethnically and culturally unique as compared to Eurocentric standards. The little things like eating with your hands, speaking a different or ‘odd-sounding’ language in public, and other factors play into society’s perception of us ‘diverse’ people. She acknowledges that though “things need to change, we are still making progress” :)

“As an over-thinker, I tend to stray away from thinking one way… I want my writing to be taken in any way possible, whether it be that those who have been reading come up with ideas in completely opposite spectrums”

Created by Pooja Manjakandy. Graphics by Haley Ma. Click here to see the original post!