The Consequences of Silence

Özgecan Kesici

She sent me a song
I did not touch.
It flew over my body like a
pigeon on North Earl Street.

                                                  I had scars in my palms.
                                                  Long nails in half-moons
                                                  that marked the end of fasting.
                                                  

And we ate.
The lambs and the vines,
the hummingbirds and
our sorrows.

                                                  She draped gold around my neck,
                                                  ​hung bangles up to my elbows.
                                                  I shone for days.
                                                 They grew heavy.
                                                  No returns –

 

She said she’d leave over her dead body
after he bruised her eye
with a plastic bottle
and we inhaled our birds,
suffocated them in our throats.

                                                 

                                                   Silver is lighter.

 

There are children singing
in the streets outside her mind.

 

                                                  She dropped a mothball shawl on my shoulders.
                                                  I tried to forget her hopeful gaze.
                                                  I swallowed my bird into my stomach
                                                  and drowned its flutter –

                                                 

She recalls only what hasn’t happened.
The catastrophes
distract her.

 

                                                  I crush sour raspberries in my mouth,
                                                  open wide to shock red
                                                  and a song.