Poetry was fairly abundant in my childhood. Not in a good, academic way. After each explosive fight, my mother darkened her diary with grieving Urdu poems. Precise Nastaliq script in ink, devastating verses. My father would scornfully recite something from Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

They divorced after I turned 10. Not one love poem between the pair.

Legally separated from my father, I went to live with my mother in her hometown. A capital of dust roads and custard apple crops. It was a government colony in the middle of nowhere. With each day, it offered less. I was born and raised in Karachi, a city on the shoreline, parading superstores for miles & a perpetual sea of sedans. People there were naturally ambitious. A town did not offer that. It did not want to.

My only connection to the metropolis was a newly bought laptop, connected to a black dial phone for internet access. It stomached calling cards with an irresponsible appetite. Each family member got sixty minutes daily to surf the internet. During my designated hour, I began reading blogs, mainly written by American moms. First World mothers sharing their lives in an oddly honest way. It was my first encounter with people writing online. I read recipes, sporting goods reviews from Utah, and relationship advice for premenopausal women.

I then began a blog of my own. Wrote things, awfully unbright things. Added a lot of photos taken with a Nikon Coolpix. My life was largely uneventful, minus a few remarkable sunsets that showed up as a reward for living. That too was worth screaming about on the internet.

The women of my family were undefeated in two things : cooking exquisitely and keeping diaries ripened with recipes and poems alike. My sister and I, once done with whatever we were reading, would feast on one diary at a time. Entering the sacred space of handpicked delicacies of many seasons. The stakes were real high here. If we got caught, which we often did, it would mean sanctions on internet privileges. Poetry thus boomeranged back into my life.

As a rite of passage, I also began a journal. Instead of borrowing poems rather illegally through my known methods, I wrote my own pieces. Mostly four-liners, rhyme heavy. I would develop a faint idea in Urdu, then translate & expand it in English. I was a frantic young person. I wrote as a wise advisor to myself, a jester of hope-baiting even. I insisted, through poems, on the generosity of the universe, that one day, all dust will settle and my entire life will mean something. My younger years were audacious indeed, if not terrifyingly optimistic. All of this was happening through a teenager’s body. Already limited, financially challenged, and not very liked.

By this time, the blogs were thinning. Instagram had arrived. Bloggers were flocking there instead for instant interactions. I followed suit. I posted my first poem on Instagram, handwritten & still in my journal. Photographed through my iPod touch. It was instantly read by real people through gleaming screens. I liked this feeling rising in me, glowing my insides, intestines & all.

I was protective of my poems. They were not dispatched alone in the world. I was quick to build a blueprint for their departure. If the journal was the vessel, a mixed-media collage went as security on the left side, the poem on the right. I spared nothing. Everything went into the collage. Crumpled flour bags, ripped clothes, streaks of watercolors. Fashion magazines later became the lifeline of my visual practice. I was getting a supply of enlarged, photographed bodies, from which I mostly borrowed hands and eyes.

Some of my long-term readers advised me to compile the writings into a book for them to carry in a physical form. A generosity for which I still have a language deficit. It was a brilliant idea that was also insane. I started daydreaming about it. Losing afternoons envisioning a paperback bearing my name. Imaginary readers clutching it across large airports, some forgetting their copy in a coffeeshop & returning panicky to retrieve it.

I began researching how to make it happen.

Amazon used to have a self-publishing platform called CreateSpace. It has since been renamed. I signed up, watched their tutorials, and got to work. I spent the next six months compiling the book. I had to add black and white artwork instead of my bright collages because a colored book was too costly to print. My sister was my editor and proofreader. When she got tired, I took over. The two of us worked relentlessly on a dying laptop that continually clung to its charger.

I named the book yesterday i was the moon, taking the first verse from a recent poem. I published it in late July, a month before my 19th birthday. I assumed a few would buy the book, the rest would congratulate me on my senseless bravery.

The book sold a lot of copies within a week. Readers, wherever Amazon could ship, started receiving their copies. An unusually large pink book with an abstract moon in the middle. Underneath it, a modified version of my government-issued name. Noor Unnahar.

Two readers found three typos.

The messages seared my cornea. That was it. I had put out a bruised book in the hands of my patrons. I apologised to the readers and dashed to correct the awful errors. The typo-ridden editions still exist, tucked away in some tropical corners. A relic of faulty labor.

The book still rose on Amazon Charts. I was more startled than delighted. After a month, I had three offers from traditional publishing houses, one being the publisher of my dreams. Penguin Random House’s imprint Clarkson Potter wanted the book. They also wanted a guided journal for both poetry and collage art. Two books in one go. I was in.

At the same time, Urban Outfitters wanted to put out an exclusive version, with a soft pink cover and an author letter. I had been a devotee of their bedding line. My Pinterest boards reeked incessantly of all they sold. It was happening.

I had little time to think. The books were selling, really selling. The contracts paid for my return to the city, a car, and a meeting with my father after ten years of familial exile. He had gotten older, lost a lot of weight. I thought he looked taller than before. His voice unchanged. I had imagined the day with at least fifty endings. It was as uneventful as the falling of a browned jujube. We all gathered at a hip restaurant, ate, and exchanged numbers. He told me his grandfather wrote poetry and screenplays pre-partition of the 1947. An artist in undivided subcontinent. He took great delight in mentioning how creativity skipped two generations to reach me. I did not know that before. I knew them as shadow people, emerging only in a twilight space of a previous life.

From there on, it felt rather natural to say here’s my father, my Toyota, and my book.

The books were translated into Dutch and Chinese. Yesterday I Was the Moon did well in China. I still have students writing to me about the literature thesis they did on my little book. One such case involved a Pakistani student in China, who translated my poems into Urdu from their Chinese translation. It was a strange homecoming. The skeletal form of those poems was in Urdu. I was amused by the universe’s scheming.

I did not set out to be anything. I became a poet out of a very deep hunger for the act of writing and uniting with an outside I was inherently locked out of. The poems were a vessel to rush me through the revolting waters I was given. Nothing in my life arrived in a linear manner. I moved because my house was halved. I wrote because there was no meaning making otherwise. My books flourished because I was offering them & someone stopped to read.

I no longer write in the pop poetry format. What began with Yesterday I Was the Moon ended with New Names for Lost Things. It is now a settled voice. It has its readers. It can survive without me multiplying it. I had to move on, find a weirder vessel, fresher water bodies.

New readers, who often join me after reading pieces like Salt, Superstitious, or Persimmons, do inspect the tectonic shifts of my poetic voice. I think the honest answer is growing up and having more resources invested into my craft. I went on to get a BFA, which I hope to turn into an MFA. I was accepted into Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for the summer, which would happen between 10 PM and 1 AM Pakistani time. I attended it with three cups of chai lined neatly on my desk. It was a minute miracle for an Instagram poet anyway.

My current practice is rooted in domesticity. Kitchen, mostly, is the altar where drafts acquire their eventual body. Sometimes, I begin with a recipe and char my way into a poem.

A literary agent recently told me my new manuscript sat at the intersection of commercial and literary. That she doesn’t have a market to sell these poems to. In all fairness, it must be true. The only agent to my name is myself. I wrote, designed, published. I compiled the book, published it, marketed it. Somehow, it was enough. I write despite markets and hierarchies. If I want joy, I will sculpt it with mud. If I must give birth to a book, it will find its way.

Thank goodness for teenage heroism. I would have made a terrible non-poet.

More deliciousness on Instagram @Noor_Unnahar

all ways of living fascinate me.

adequate living, fearful living, livid living, desperate living, unaware living, sticking absolutely to joy living, jungle of desire living, large tub of lies living.

how many ways have i lived? perhaps many. for in my head’s large pool, it’s crowded & humid. hot breaths of previous selves scuttling. i do not take great pride in my old, odd lives. the first set was spent on my mother, the second on work, the third on the sky, and the fourth on whatever.

what i want is Entire Living. in fact, it’s on my immediate to-do list, penned on a lilac sticky note. i have put it on the fridge with a Kuala Lumpur magnet, a replica of Petronas Towers in plaster of Paris. i respect words. i honour promises formed in writing. i journal my plans, after-plans, non-plans. each page, my witness. their continuity, my compass.

on thursdays, i investigate my decades with an expensive therapist. the past’s door is silver and hideous. knock for information and you’ll be handed the memories wrong. their heads hastily sewn, their hair matted. it’s frustrating. it is a fault inherent to the inquiry itself. remembering is for the present, memory vomits & gets naked elsewhere. which is to say, i have not yet gotten reminiscing right.

i do have a habit of picturing grief obsessively. no actual events, merely the feeling itself. summon it as a physical figure, give it long limbs and diastema teeth. oiled hair and a runny nose. i want evidence of the trespasser in my only body. i have lived with a clenched stomach, cystic ovaries, anterior pelvic tilt, and a fire in my mouth. all pain is homely and routine.

so yes, i want Entire Living. i want its famous forgiveness & soft sinking. i want its unprofitable weeks and idle being. i want the clouds to parade rabbits and robins & un-form axes. i want the elms in the dark to make branch puppets. i want diaphragmatic breathing, my tongue untied, and my spine aligned. i can’t do it with other lives searing my insides, their bright red tongs prepared. i mean no yanking, only settling or burying or loud fucking howling.