From a drowning

All night the wind shapes ellipses
From the sacrum of sea-husked boats

Water narrows the paisley of its tongue
As if a Persian blue hyphen—

All distance is an emptied hourglass,
An Alice universe too luminous in its lie

Men with hands like leather-bound bibles
tease the weeded augury of conch-songs

Maghrib is a drooping sonance, a mapless gull
        —a compass breastfed on ambergris

These are the roots I can’t be clawed from
I can’t perfume my throat with Calo or Pashtu

Just like I can’t liquor the blackout of my father’s
Suicide. Leaving is cloudless – the sky always

Barefoot, ennobled

by its own alizarin calligraphy

Ancestors of rock salt cathedrals.
Ancestors of storm-chasing caravans

What am I if not splintered phosphorescence?
A gasp of voltage. Trickled Trout.

The spine of God filigreeing the coral
Cave of my mouth. The chambered echo

Of my heart flowering inwards
Into a hungry anemone

Pınar

in another country, you could be تلاطم, upheavals, anomie—an exuberant tapestry
kissing the knee at namaaz
in this one you are a diagnosis of bask-tendered geysers, a field filigreed in eras of
narcissi

here we forget the violaceous roam of herons, a pulsing estrangement we have
learned to name home. a stream of fireflies embroidering a resilient light to the spice
bazaars

we go where the apple trees have grottoed into shadows of old mosques

to spoor into that roseate forgetting—a mind grown quietly into seams of quartz
each tongue teased by its own paused memory. a foreignness as cold as a foggy tarmac,

a torn baggage-tag. a spring as blue as the hand of fatima,
a haemorrhage perorated through the borrowed accent of an open vein