“maps are ghosts”

You can cannot swallow poetry
rest assured, your fork and knife

but poetry will swallow you whole
under a Tuscan sun, in another life.

Ghostly maps will hollow you
the void will ask

what is yet to become of you?
of love?

side of wings

Yesterday I woke up as a stale breadcrumb,
sitting on a rusted platter in front of a little boy.
His hands aching of charcoal,
his snot dripping, shivering, as he stared at me, wishing I was the side of wings the man at the diner tossed away in the garbage, so casually.
The only thing separating them was a 2cm glass window. My conscience can’t catch a breath, ever since I woke up as a..

icing

this afternoon I asked the old woman at Ann Sather to pack another box of frosting for the cinnamon rolls, I’m not sure why this glaze brings me so much comfort, perhaps because it reminds me of the first time I made cinnamon rolls in 2015… to impress you. Exactly five years ago we were all setting our milestone goals, “where will I be in 5 years?”
It’s five years later now, here we are. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve moved, and although I hate missing all the birthdays and weddings back home I still love Chicago, what do we do? If I knew better, I’d break my goals in half, strategically, so I could be here, there, and everywhere. But I can’t, I could never have. For now, home is where the cinnamon rolls are, I guess.

Disingenuous

is a brief term for the quickest reality check. Perhaps my biggest feud will always be with how we treat sincerity like it’s the extra nickel the cashier shoves down our throat – the one we drop on the floor on our way out the store anyway. The hardest pill to swallow is the one on my nightstand; a bottle of unrealistic expectations that put everyone on a pedestal, but myself. Labeled “just something about the human condition.”
We practice to shrink ourselves to accommodate others, as if sincerity is a dish only served to the ones worthy. Did no one ever teach us
that if you can’t reciprocate the genuine, then you could at least
spare us the facade
of unnecessary comparisons to a journey that was never
even yours
to begin with?

when I..

When I grow old, I will wear a lot of blue. Some days to make up for the youth I spent doubting myself and some to remind my husband of the day he first saw me. We will dance in the kitchen and I will ask him to bring the crib back from the attic so we can perhaps give it away now that our babies have their own babies. But after he brings it out I will stare at it till my eyes tear up and I’ll tell him we can’t let go just yet, he will smile and set it back, neat and tidy. We will spend hours picking white long stem roses and I will set them in a glass vase on the backyard windowsill. I will grow fresh tomatoes in our yard to remind myself of the days spent in Turkey where my best friend’s mother cooked us menemen with carmine tomatoes she grew herself. So we’ll put menemen on the stove and we’ll continue dancing in the kitchen. At the end of the day I will contently wear the roses, tied around my wrist with a blue ribbon.