✨ Poetry
Reflections in Borrowed Light
I. The Antique Shop
In the dusty corner of memory,
I find a mirror with a gilded frame—
not mine, but borrowed from my grandmother's
attic, where light comes in slanted,
filtered through decades of collected dust.
The glass is clouded, silvering at the edges
like an old photograph fading into white.
I press my face close and see
not myself, but all the women
who stood here before me,
adjusting their hair, their hope,
their carefully constructed faces.
II. Multiplied
In the three-way mirror at the department store,
I am fractured into angles—
left profile, right profile, the back of my head
I never see except in reflection.
Each version of me is a stranger,
slightly off, like a word repeated
until it loses meaning.
Which one is real?
Which one do others see
when they look at me and think they know?
III. The Compact
My mother's compact, small enough
to fit in a palm, holds a mirror
no bigger than a silver dollar.
In it, I can only see
one feature at a time—
an eye, the curve of a cheek,
the corner of my mouth.
This is how we know ourselves:
in pieces, never the whole,
always assembling the fragments
into something we hope
resembles truth.
IV. Borrowed Light
Every mirror is a thief,
stealing light from somewhere else
to show us what we think we are.
But light is honest—
it reveals the cracks, the lines,
the places where we've tried
to smooth ourselves into
something more presentable.
I stand in borrowed light,
in reflected truth,
and finally understand:
the woman in the glass
is not me, but the story
I've been telling myself
about who I might be,
who I was,
who I'm still becoming
in the space between
the mirror and my eyes.
About the Poet
Marina Castellanos is a poet and visual artist whose work explores themes of memory, identity, and the fragmented self. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and Ploughshares. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. "Reflections in Borrowed Light" is part of her forthcoming collection, Mirrored Selves, which examines how we construct identity through reflection and observation.