Özgecan Kesici-Ayoubi

Özgecan Kesici-Ayoubi is a writer, translator, and researcher whose work has appeared in Banshee Press, Poetry Ireland Review, and is forthcoming in Gorse, among others. She is the recipient of the Irish Arts Council Bursary Award in Literature and the Berlin Senate Work Stipend for Literature. Her translations have been published in Asymptote, Sand Journal, and Magma Poetry, and are forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books. She holds a PhD in Sociology from University College Dublin.

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The Drift

We drift on a song on repeat across a sky.

We said patience, sabyr, but she barely heard the world for her sob.

Baba married her young, only sixteen and three years older than me, Baba died and she was all I could turn to, we broke cardamom pods together, we grew up together, like siblings, she was the daughter of the locals and left them all behind. Your child is her shöbere too, first on her tally, I lost two elders in the span of months, the weight of deeds heavy on her and haunts the garrets of her mind, she is here and not teaching my child sabyr and our assassins of time entwined I am here and not, formalin wrapped around those deeds, documenting our steady displacement.

Retire from living Nana, sometimes it’s just too tiring. What is a life?

We hang in mental geography, drifting with our love  from place to place,

like ants building storage:

like me carrying home books from shops

trying to stuff some insatiable black hole

to create a home.

Cool tea for your grandchildren instead,

pour hot liquid from bowl to bowl.

I think of my own /

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 Turning

When the leaves turn like this

and float low —

Laub on Laub,

returning, drifting like snow.

I breathe in your soft shampoo hair —

the shimmering chestnut sheet.

How does a white dress carry leaves

on its tail, raking the grounds.

            I stand in the hallway

            of the flat in Hörwarthstraße

            where we left three decades

            of everything behind.

            I stand by the little table

            with the curly wired red telephone

            and watch my mother in a wide skirt

            on a mahogany chair. She has served

            poğaca and çay —

            the millennium is six years away.

            Her head carries a lazy shawl.

            Blurred faces on the sofa,

            my father among them.

            They recite in low voices

            the air too thick for them

            to be heard.

            The bunch of my mother’s skirts —

            twirled into tight knots in drawers.

            She carries me to my cot

            I cry and I cry —

            “If you keep crying like this,

            your head will pop like a balloon.”

Dede didn’t have toys in his house

we made a pyramid of feet

Banu placed one foot on his

I stacked mine on hers

until we had a pile and we raced to see

who could keep their foot on top.

Dede didn’t have toys in his house, instead

he showed us how to use our bodies.

I like to think his thin body laughed

a lot that day —

I’d ask him how he felt the day

he lost his young wife.

I’d ask him what he remembered

of his parents.

I’d ask him all the Kazakh words

I cannot find in online dictionaries.

You picked a feather from between the leaves,

tickled me with it.

You understand the seasons turn now.

Ocean, gold, copper, brass, rust.

At night, you cry and you cry.

I warn you about your head.

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The Distal Mother

after Fiona Moore

I rescue you from time that is not. You tremble in Aran sweaters, woven by others, when you’d prefer  shell-grains between your thick toes, a warm spot filled with sand, our mother far behind. Spindly strands of light hair shifting past the dark mole on your eyebrow, I call to you, wave from a comical canoe, tell you the waters are shallow. You remain stuck in your place as you did when the credits rolled after you’d disappeared into darkness. I held your hand often, now you hold my girl’s; like we’ve swapped and speak of clouds and the sad willow tree and the end point remains silent when I say I too was your mother. Will you please roll up your jeans and wade over I’m afraid you’ll sink into a marl hole and I’ll be unable to rescue you from time that is not. You, yellow sun.

I guess this too is inheritance, punishment for not staying put.

We let them control our bodies. By doing so, we find a safe place in the world, a good place, a clean place.

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