Sarai Adès – I stand before a mirror that has learned too much

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three Nov-Dec 2026.

I stand before a mirror that has learned too much, poem by Sarai Adès.

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I stand before a mirror that has learned too much

Once it offered choices: this side, that side, this dress, that tie,
the inherited choreography of wrists and eyes.

Now it only reflects an endless footnote.

Every gesture arrives already deconstructed, each desire annotated in the
margins. I reach for femininity and my hand closes around…what?

History? Coalitions? Wounds?

I wear lipstick and hear the machinery. I reject lipstick and hear the machinery.
The gears turn regardless, producing meaning from difference, difference from meaning.

Meanwhile I still want— absurdly, stubbornly— to belong to the word woman.

I can’t define it, but somewhere inside the collapse of certainty there remains
a gravitational pull towards the label I seek to critique.

Theory has done its work.

The walls are down, they lie in heaps around me, the bricks stamped with
categories but I know better now.

I know gender is a performance, a citation, a repetition of a repetition of a repetition.

But still, at three in the morning, I want to ask:

yes, but what am I citing?

And manhood—

What is that? A category? A costume?

I say I do not want to be a man, then spend hours interrogating the sentence.

Do not want.

To be.

A man.

This feels important.

Then immediately impossible.

If the category dissolves, why does my refusal remain?

If there is no essence, why does the aversion survive?

The body keeps asking questions

the mind has already critiqued.

Soon there is nothing left but syntax picking through its own wreckage.

-I think femininity is just a rumour.

I shouldn’t, but I follow its traces.

A hand on a collarbone. A certain way of occupying space. The collective memory of being looked at.

The strange warmth I felt ‘being a girl, a woman.’

The old boundaries are gone. Good, I tell myself. They were cages.

The old boundaries are gone and now the horizon has entered the room.

But how do you represent yourself when the self has become a label, that carries an asterisk, that leads to another page, and another, and another?

My identity arrives like an argument that keeps discovering new premises.

I circle womanhood the way a skeptical anthropologist circles a sacred site.

I do not believe in the shrine.

I cannot leave the shrine.

I write papers about the shrine.

I dream about the shrine.

Some mornings I assemble a body the way an archivist assembles fragments: only proximity to the truth I crave.

I am not searching for an essence.

I am searching for a shape that remains after the theories have eaten their own tails.

Until then, I live here: between the desire to name myself and the knowledge that names are weather.

Perhaps all that remains

Is an orientation. A leaning. A recurring motion of the soul.

Like a sunflower that has forgotten what the sun is, studied the history of sunlight, published several critiques of heliocentrism, and still turns towards the beaming thing.

The mirror waits. I wait.

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© Sarai Adès

Sarai Adès is a 15-year-old emerging poet, singer, songwriter, dancer and actor. Her poem, ‘The Country’s Misplaced Tongue,’ won the Voice for Nature award in the Wilds With Words Poetry Competition.