The Night the City
tried to speak with me, I
was immersed in the mundane—
streaks of grease like lightning bolts
my daughter’d smeared against the stovetop,
her crayons arrayed atop the couch
and under it, and plastic animals,
dogs and dinosaurs and turtles,
everywhere. When she finally fell asleep,
I ventured to the balcony to watch
the snow begin to fall, the very large flakes
colliding with the minarets, the taxi
drivers huddling with cigarettes
and speaking of Beren Saat, how beautiful
her mouth, how unlikely she lingered
on Channel 4. And so I realized
they were the city called Istanbul,
their voices and desires,
their misgivings aside the heat
of their taxis that winter. I should’ve been
a better listener, a better father
then, and come to them to say
it’s all untrue: the Modern Mosque
at Kozyatağı, the snow, the acting of
a poorly written plot that somehow
has affected all of us forever.
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.
Header photo by Engin Akyurt, courtesy Pixabay.
