After the Turkey-Syria Earthquake.
Cambridge, Massachusetts February 2023
At first there was a killing.
One small infection of the womb.
Hold her, read to her. Ten pages
in the winter. Ten pages in the spring.
Pre-seed, pro-seed, pre-clamp,
pro-cedural. Do you want to be happy?
Or do you want to be a burning rod of iron
filled with worms?
Your baby has developed eyes.
They are small and sexy, and like
your insides—they are shining.
Pre-conflation, post-balloon.
We are cooking all the bones right now
as if to shed them, drink their juice.
II
One lengthy, snowing tube of hills
emerge, its contours pulsing
in the darkness. And so I go:
I dip down into that empty
hole, where every semblance
of landscape has already
been lost. It doesn’t matter Ayla,
Osman, Isminur. You become
someone, and then stand inside a halo
made of stones.
III
Your baby is developing a yolk sac for protection.
Three layers that we might call skin: endo, meso, morph—
How would you approach this mirrored vista of encounter?
How would you avoid this sort of touch that is no touch?
It was the wrong time for anything, and so
I took one picture. And so I went to bed
ten thousand times, and never slept.
IV
In sleep, I said there was the onslaught of a fetus.
One lentil-shaped image bleeding
in the wall. Now what remains is excavation: particles
of winter light made dark by every form.
There was nothing left to do
but to twist and split back into her.
There was nothing left but to describe each kind of pain
half as thoroughly as it was felt. But the felt I felt
was a couch thrown out, one robotic doll iced over, set
on fire, reinvented, and then drowned.
V
In another dream, some other mother takes
my hand and brings me to a different
question. Are you the voice for the damned?
Are you a speaker in the house
of he damned? There is a woman sleeping
beside me who wants to—needs to—know.
In every world, one home to raise the children.
In every home, one room to raise the ghosts.
