No sound,
here, only land
and blues.

In the Delta, the sky presses down on the land or the land presses up, so much so that they conspire faith in a quiet God. I had traveled to the South before.

We learn about the horror too early in the morning these days.

Standing in the kitchen waiting for the coffee water to boil, hearing only the muted roaring and thumping of the gas flames on the metal pot, I act against my better instincts and reach for the iPhone sitting on top of the silent kitchen radio.

The sun was roasting him. And the Southern road was swallowing him up. The land seemed ravenous. And there was a hunger in his head that had been there for a long time.

The boy watches them from the outdoor pool, the men on the fence, perched like birds on a wire. They are present every day, from the moment the boy opens his shutters in the morning until his parents send him to bed at night.

It was always the same—the breathlessness, the palpitating heart, the constricted throat. Gasping for air on a street corner or cowering in a doorway as they passed, Martin Reiss suffered from an inexplicable fear of children.

A stranger came singing his grief through the snow. He was alone in the bombed shell of the city, which had been abandoned like dozens of others. His voice wailed like the ghost of a train coming home. And with his song, the city awoke.

Here comes sad-smiling Death, carting his hairy bag of calamities. He stomps his toe-pinching boots around the pastel neighborhood, knocks with sharp knuckles, folds open the bag to show what he has to sell. The mothers say, “Not today. Sorry.”

They say Aunt Jane had birds in her head. Each time she had a thought she didn’t speak out loud, it turned into a bird. When she had a lot of thoughts, the birds would build up and chirp and twitter and peck at the sides of her skull to be let out. They gave her terrible headaches.

William Webber swiveled in his office chair, sucking on a cough drop. Leo Shea, the woman, perched on a less vital chair. It was a cold room. Carpet. Gray walls. Ceiling of exposed plumbing.

Through the small window in her mother’s kitchen, the back lot is barren. Treeless, grassless. Nothing grows. November is always cold in Iğdır, always gray. Her mother moves into the doorway. Ceylan can feel her, the disturbance of air.

What does it mean, to see someone and not see that person at the same time?

I’m sitting on my porch: the messiest one on the block, a ruckus of flowers and rusty bike spokes. Near the railing there’s a surprise cantaloupe, sprouted from compost soil.

The milk’s spill reflects red next to the torn bear’s heart.

While making dinner, I speak to my vanished brother. He announces

a black dog carrying in a gift of glistening pig bone

from a field filled with butterflies filled with hunger.

Last time you called me flower

I punched you in the face.

Who needs a blood bank now?

I watched them do it,


their small, fat fingers taking

to the swell of chest a blunt scalpel

and peeling, no, sawing into stomach

Every time we touched the earth,

each shovelful was supposed to mean

something: the first, difficulty;

the second, more. The earth yielded

I sang tenor in the school choir

because the boys’ balls hadn’t

dropped, or their balls had but not

their voices. On the highest riser,

Before the woman leaps off the 160-foot platform, she sees

the tear-colored ghost of her body.

Far below, beneath her, a man watches. He's gracefully hauled

her sweaty backpack, weighed down

or the vans

to empty

or the tractor’s ripper

to split

the earth & everything else.

shows us that it’s incapable

of mercy, we stay up all night

and practice how to be merciful

Long after

her fears had passed my daughter asks

me why the river never flows back.

I tell her that it’s like how bones