Turkish Woman at Night
She carries gallons of milk in each hand
and wears her husband’s clothes,
but I see no home in where she goes,
just the hills and the highway
and occasional shotgun blasts—blue dots
like unnamed worlds on the horizon.
Maybe there are paths I don’t see;
maybe the nothing of the night shields her
from predators—other husbands
who have waited long, slowly drunk
off long, thin glasses, sexless and confused.
This is for the children, she might say,
and this to sweeten the cake. But the cosmos
is another thing, and where she came from
and where she goes and how she sees
what I might not, American of suburbia
and yellow windows stretching forever.
In her walking’s a resistance, a history
scratched on wallpaper kitchens
in Konya, Kayseri, and Karaman.
Somewhere a man, somewhere a girl
with a conflicted Anatolian soul.
• • •
For My Ex
My ex-lover turned from Swinburne
and St. John and chamomile tea
to postmodern sexy, big Ray-Bans
and a silver stud in her nose. She goes
to the Maryland mountains and sleeps
with dark-featured men who dance
well and do not care how Winfield Scott
fared at Manassas. All history’s old now
and especially that I refused to dance
and drank beer at the Union instead,
two dollars a pint, and wept because
my mother’s dog was home, weeping.
I had a wife and a sin I concealed,
a scar I told her was Lincoln’s she licked
until everything blurred, lost like youth
on the verge of being different. I see
a thousand ways I might’ve stayed
with her, a thousand pounding hours
of skin on skin, climaxes at dawn.
Now I am old and she is beautiful again,
and the years cut past us unusually.
If she were near, I’d tell her Robert E. Lee
made fortresses with rheumy lungs,
delayed while everything drifted away.
• • •
What It Meant to Be a Woman
I found in you enough to make me bleed,
and wild with pain I’d run
inside a sun-colored gown, stooping
now to drink, then to listen.
To the birds I was lovely and wise,
and they’d stop because I was,
stop singing, and in their pauses
I discovered what it meant to be a woman.
To be surrounded by silence,
to be without clothes, to feel something
emerging from my skin, another I,
another something not of this world.
I was a map, you the hard driver
through the courses of my blood, brutal
and sweet, time after time, until not even
the watchers could watch anymore.
Then singly, as in a dream, the stars
fell out of the sky as I lay on my back
and the air gained a pulse, deciding what to do
with me, my secrets and my skin.
Then the real dreams: young men
standing in shadows with flowers,
phrases in my diary, the raisin bread
I set on the table a thousand years ago.
• • •
Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently The Maine Review and The Hawaii Review. A 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, Boon recently edited a volume on the sublime in American cultural studies