Recenter Press
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    • Rest of US by Richard Hamilton
    • evening primroses by Emma Loomis-Amrhein
    • Profit | Prophet by Patrick Blagrave
    • To Hold Your Moss-Covered Heart by Schuyler Peck
    • The Good House & The Bad House by Doe Parker
    • The Road Is Long & Beautiful by Terra Oliveira
    • And Still To Sleep by Terra Oliveira
    • An Old Blue Light by Terra Oliveira
    • Processes: A Meditation by Terra Oliveira
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    • Issue Four: Fall 2020
    • Issue Three: Spring 2020
    • Issue Two: Fall 2019
    • Issue One: Spring 2019
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Kuşköy in Virginia

BY LEYL ÇOLPAN.


                                In this
Appalachian kitchen
we conjure     my grand
mother as a girl

                                in Giresun,
braise the restorative collards
switch kuyruk yağı
​ for pigfat
when we think God isn’t looking.
Nine stares          silent down her bird-nose
green eyes piercing green-smelling steam.

                                For every sea-child
I was not I was     a hill-child:
friend to mountain-deer and baby
birds a-chitter off the flank
of the hills, oblivious
to every woman
                                I would not be.

The women
                                of Kuşköy,
bird-swallowers, pleat
their voices into nests.
Where the mountain breaks
their village or a husband or a father
they cast out     fishing-lines of whistle
string a secret      bird tongue
cross the valley’s      throat, the tea-fields.
Some ride those whistles clear across
the Atlantic     stake them to foreign hillsides
in Virginia     plait a bridge out
of collard greens.

                Generations     pass, thus I
am born into a strange tongue:
half-stag, half-bird, wholly     opaque. Fate
decrees I should keep boy-company, grow horns, break
hazelnuts like mountains in my cheek.
                Despite it     I softened, feathered
a degenerate     not the father’s

wanted and
virtuously boy-blooded
boy

                fought to gauge a father’s
muffled whistling from the far
hills of his liver     his own
male womb     fatted amniotic
distillery--
                                (Here, the collard-pot
                boils over.)

                                In Giresun,
mountains nest the Black
Lake, down-soft, wholly opaque.
Anti-mirror,      its throat
too deep to cough back
faces we dropped in.
                                In bird-speak,
my grandmother says you will come swimming
heavy     sweet water regendering
my mouth (Earthblack cakes
      my cheek     too bitter to swallow
                               too thick to spit.)    Back

                                in Appalachia,
a father tries to take me deer-hunting.
                I drown

that self in the muzzle of an uncle’s
gun, having chosen          the birds, the deer
                their cryptolect:

                My legs go thin
                I dress myself with precious spots uncountable
                show off my baby-flank
                ​chitter high-pitched to other boys.

He swears it isn’t loaded.

Leylâ Çolpan is a poet, translator, and undergraduate CREaTE Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Hir interests include the poetics of Turkish-American diaspora, delinearization and multiplicity in language, fragmentary texts, and the Anatolian and Central Asian folk traditions. Hir current work examines Black Sea grief poetry, biracialism, bilingualism, and Sufism as queer spirituality. Ze is happy and in love. You can follow hir on Twitter @autogalatea.
  • About
  • Books
    • Rest of US by Richard Hamilton
    • evening primroses by Emma Loomis-Amrhein
    • Profit | Prophet by Patrick Blagrave
    • To Hold Your Moss-Covered Heart by Schuyler Peck
    • The Good House & The Bad House by Doe Parker
    • The Road Is Long & Beautiful by Terra Oliveira
    • And Still To Sleep by Terra Oliveira
    • An Old Blue Light by Terra Oliveira
    • Processes: A Meditation by Terra Oliveira
  • Journal
    • Issue Four: Fall 2020
    • Issue Three: Spring 2020
    • Issue Two: Fall 2019
    • Issue One: Spring 2019
  • Interviews