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The Argotist Online |
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YELIZ
BIBER I am currently studying for a PhD in Theatre Studies in the School of English at the University of Leeds. I enjoy reading the poems of Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Nazim Hikmet and Necip Fazil Kisakurek. If I were to cite the name of my favourite poet, it would be Marguerite Duras whose prose is highly inspirational and is as poetic as verse, if not more so. Fish
You’re What is left over To the rest of your laughter Delta at rest, Smash-sprinkled all around A glass doll. The waste Of the wasteland. Once, I counted the hide-and-seeks On your city-smoked cheeks Scraped there from many a year ago, It reads: ‘This sorrow was loaded on my eyes The moment I was born When I struggled to erase, It stained all my face.’ Then, you held your face close “Gilded like a fish” Plum-cold
smiled and said, “I never wear my eyebrows” You look at me through your round eyes You, sole. I lace a breathing sore From your silence, your core. Istanbul
A young girl working in a textile
factory on shifts makes a doll- a woman in Istanbul- out of the scraps of cloth she brings back from work. A linen doll with no face but all over chewing-gum pink under the chest. If they ever asked her what she wanted
to be She would say a gull Shorter in one leg who dreams of flying beyond the boats under Bosphorus who would, limping, be fed by the children and drunkards throwing morsels of their simit calculatingly towards her. There is the city and my pillow where the revolts Are muted. Mansions destroyed along the Uskudar
shores. On my sheets arsonists are taking the last steps of
a waltz. I release my basket to swing over the seven hills And towards the conquered skies I blow
out the cinnamon dust On my zythum. Of all those dresses I have tried on It is only the pink doll’s That is left to me. And, onion flavoured dish in the steam
cooker In an Istanbul house, made by the dark hands of a widow means there is a little girl drawing a
perfect heart on the kitchen window.
YOUR
HANDS FENCE
Morning
Unnoticeable As
you wave at friends Your
blurred, distorted hands. Fingers
fisted on joints Like
street children on a cracked pavement Each
standing still Blanked
out by the sacrament. Northbound:
they freeze on the keys of a piano Icicles
watching me outside my window Never
to dance To
the tune of flesh In
a hunchback’s pose, your stranger’s hands Night
Your
fingertips wear A
prostitute’s sabot shoes And
walk on the roof of my cella My
eyes, tightly closed jars My
giant’s nostrils -walk
in if you like- Fumed
with the rye-dust From
a narcotic volcano, from the palms of your Mischievous,
Mezzo
soprano hands Mirror You
must have caressed A
barbed wire somewhere And
assumed it would not harm If
it wasn’t thine. That’s
why Your
blood rusted and finely drew The
lacking finger of swastika. Touch
your face, Now Touch
your face Timid
as your half nails Can
you map out a sudden smile On your necrotic hands?
copyright
© Yeliz Biber |