Istanbul → Gaziantep

Abstract

Istanbul → Gaziantep James Byrne (bio) for F Guilty as privilege. To be here where you should be. But not here. Weighing kofte bari, çemen otu behind the splint-fillings of Yeni mosque. No words for no word from the smuggler broker. To call. Not to call. To be left waiting on the end of the line. To uselessly pull apart Kurdish rugs, haggling over prices as they price you up. Money rots. Your elders are cashed out/into the unravelling bribe. Call it what it is. Wary over WhatsApp [Delete this………Delete]. Red blush tomatoes slip too easily down the throat. Mesopotamian host eyes up the cost of an oil truck stuttering across the Bosporus. You are crammed around your uncle’s TV watching Premier League reruns. Choose wisely not to celebrate, sliding in the winning goal on Cox’s beach. You turn your face into someone else. Your name into Bangla. Send the visa a week ahead but still the flight grounds another and again. On Büyükada, a Turkish flag severs the landing boat. You wait, linger at water like the Marmaran sea tunnelling into white haze. To hear no news changes nothing. Everything. A crow shatters the window pane. Stares at its own reflection. Unable to fly. Dilek Taşi. Place a hand on the wish column. The sweating column. Laugh out your tears on the weeping column. Scree your hand anti-clockwise. Cool it on a marble jar from Pergamon. If the muzzein’s voice holds until the last note, it rings for truth. But whose? One wish. To walk freely through Imaret’s gate. As if leaving were simplicity. One footstep to another. For you to travel anywhere without so much as a bow. Without fear of misdirection. The security guard at the door rattles prayer beads behind his back. Another counts tourists through the treasury chamber to a Minbar where Mary rings the dome, holds her immaculate son on the divan’s white eiderdown. That you could walk from the Malfili of Murad aligning yourself with the blue/green mosaics and speak your name: Allah. Jesus. That the hand of another will carry you through the sky. The holy texts are bound by the same tiles but the Imams’ translation of the ten commandments does not fit, says the guidebook. And yet all the gold in the bazaar passes beyond [End Page 51] skin. On the diesis, a precursor asks Christ to intercede on the behalf of humanity. Hand poised, but the eyes look past you asking: why? A blue dome’s improbable fold leaves no room for error. How the light breaks through. You do not trust it you say (since no one can be trusted). Don’t tell them any names or dates. Wipe out the messages as you go. A signature innocuous as the mark of a fingernail clawing at a wall. No one is working on Hagia’s southern restoration, but the scaffold remains. It has been like this for years now says the guide shuffling in a cast of expensively bored Russians. Place your hand on the column, ask for someone else’s luck. For the garden of Constance to unlock. For the emperor’s green door (güzel kapi, the Beautiful Door) to open just for you. Dilek Taşi. Place your hand on the wish column. Sweat out the mythamous of history. Laugh your tears loud. Under Sofia, Medusa’s head is caught sideways by Perseus, Poseidon [insert other names here]. The column trickles down, 100 ft filled, it’s said, with the tears of slaves. In the darkness you thought no one was looking, but he is here always, changeable as sky: Christ to Apollonius. In the dark, unsure, unbeliever, to pray beyond the everywhere corruptibility of it all. Because anyone should be free to walk through a door and drink in this sun, this stiff air. for C Town of the wounded veteran. To Gaziantep from where did you come? The same question asked each day. Are farmers burning off the pistachio fields, or is it something else? The burning of the bomb. A boy lights up the wickertip of a pomegranate and feints...