With What Eyes
BY LEYLA ÇOLPAN
In Virginia I was graceless, a child matted head
to toe with language
Scratched it in my inverse book above the valley
Vexed my burnt-end tulip-stalk
against the page. Did I believe then—
who may name him?—
Was the burnt flower of my tongue
good Enough to ripple down the hills?
To what eyes was my girl-body hieroglyph
my boy-body kindling?
In Virginia’s lungs was I called smoke, what tulip
curling in the cinders’ public house—
was I called red, called flaming? In the wide heart
of the valley what faith read me, lampblack:
Who may name him?— The neighbor-boys
roar faggot—With what eyes and Without
burning Who can see their god?
Intercessor
BY LEYLA ÇOLPAN
Even before boy-beautiful, you child
skipping unsexed on eggshells, yellow ghost.
Rock down blue and gentle in its crucible
ply the false constellation
of your sex.
In the act you play intercessor, still
between the man and a still
smaller woman, still nearer to a child.
However much you ask I cannot look at you in sex,
its glaucous hush. We shuttle ghosts
between us, stitch up the constellations
brush the ash out from the crucible.
For our bodies rendered mute within the crucible
stitches and their sexes burning, still—
for limbs incensed, in revolt, in constellation—
may knit new, autonomous sex.
For any woman at night is a ghost
for anything alone, a child.
•
Post-propofol, still out of it, half-ghost
and giddy, gasping as a child at de novo constellations:
your body’s anti-crucible
ex nihilo, your sex.
Alageyik
BY LEYLA ÇOLPAN
We didn’t stay on that white mountain
not once winter cut its bright blue line into the birch.
Each night we denied the hot gun-metal
answered muzzle with the valley, lifted our unbroken bowl.
I was your little brother there, your sister
paper that I was. In the birch copse you cradled
the bullets of your silence in your side for me.
Was it gentle was it boyhood’s soft
stone on the lake-bottom, warping? Did you too wear yourself
smooth? Fawn-child with fawn-child
threading charcoal needles in the snow
against your family’s country:
speckled and unkilled in its white gorge.
The road was littered with us those days
vital, that we open.
