four poems

Ayaz Muratoglu

Oak

I was raised in oblique ideas

in the dark evenings of the young century.

There were daffodils, and cherry blossoms, and

the learning of how to ride a bicycle by the water.

Under the tallest tree on the block, I watched

afternoons roll by. The oak tree over the garden

kept score. My companions were the smallest flowers

and a whistled sky—you’ve seen it, right?

Oddly, I have endured it:

so many days under the tree

your voice in my head

a six-year gaze

and my darling, when have you ever felt so there?

Just under the bed, between the

pillows and the stack of books on the table—

simulacra breaking

I bend to my knees

A Boy’s Song

Wind changes and the lock of the unfixed window

Stays closed. The scars have shifted across a chest,

Catching the birds at a rosy-fingered dawn.

We have, under the kitchen sink, many tools

To keep the weather going: a carpeted snow,

Lavender scented cleaning solution for the wooden floors,

Green envelopes. The temperature won’t budge,

Its fingers sticking

Pipe leaks.

What child looks out a window and plays with a stranger

On the street? What delicious morning food has

Waded its way to the kitchen through the caking snow?

They call me wind-chested, my shades a bird,

My weather the envelope, carpet waking—

I can fly over rooftops, steal a window

To catch a corny stare.

Middling Time

I’m anatomically out of sync: this instant can’t bear the load of that one. A fan in the room whirs and I can’t think straight into it.

My wide plays catch with the side. Your impermanence in the window.

Did you remember to catch it? The poisoned underbelly of.

Twitching.

God in the spaces between buildings. Narrow.

Break at the bone. A desolate heat.

When I was born, a fly flickered into the room, bloodless and cold. A warning. My mother’s back loose on the bed frame.

Severe weather. A man walks down the street. His shoulders bend at the wind.

Unspooling, the yarn winds its way under the door.

Slope Edge

When it came time to wrap the book in its wedding tulle,

the groom stepped out (of the room)

to look at the sky and memorize the shape of the clouds

just beneath the sun. This was the day breaking,

its tenor sharp against a crack of wind.

Brisk on the neck, then down the sides, slope edge.

Her gaze drew back towards a distant moment

a Saturday years ago seared into the sides of this one: heat and sun,

the shepherd marching up the hill, a serious angle

labored breathing, and the sheep writhing up the side of the slope,

edging, a white metal bedframe and its insides.

In sleep, the day blooms

with wanting. Your hand, there,

holding six colored pencils

under a dappled sky.

I’m marrying a book today, he said to the sun, whose movements

he’d been watching since childhood, when he was a girl, not a boy,

counting and clocking in completionist rooms.

You want the story to end? the sun asked back—

and the groom, his back to the house, nodded. His necktie loosened.

A vibration bent its way towards the unseeing edge: providing, bounded.

So when the carriage pulled up, driver and all,

the groom did not know where to look. How long of a gaze? Which flesh?

Did her skin hold his memory? His side of the bed?

Surely the pillows would remember him, a side sleeper whose feet never stopped moving.

She looked at him then with eyes glazed by mid-June afternoon sun:

distant and ever. He crumpled beneath the weight, carried his legs over the doorstep

into the darkening kitchen. Six evenings passed.

The wedding called off, the book tossed back onto the shelf,

and the sun

its movements clocking

handfuls of dried flowers

buried under shallow dirt.

A liner on the near side of the jacket

Scaffolding out the window