Naming Istanbul

By Jeffrey Kahrs

Naming Istanbul: I

 Palace of baubles and balustrades,

lustrous prison luring provincials

to bang together cement shotgun shacks

on steep hillsides

                                 this:

tumbling anarchy of immigration

with Yayla dreams

                                    (oh

for the summer pasture!)

Naming Istanbul: II

Sacred oaks hacked apart for a road.

What’s left of the limbs?

The best Italian restaurant in town

And a church with scraggly plane trees.

Still, lamb chops Provençale marinated

in rosemary and white wine sauce

offer remarkable proof of how destruction

is deliciously infused into life—but no triumph.

Just felled trees and sawdust, bucked rounds,

quarters split to the heart stacked in a shed

to dry till it’s time to burn. Hmmm…

I think I also tasted thyme.

Nice to meet you…

pleasure’s all mine.

Istanbul Names: III

Teyze dreads late August.

All year cleaning houses

                           then

back to the village

to cook and clean for

the extended family of 15—

                                                       (she’ll also

pick and dry hazelnuts).

                   In the evening men

will get drunk on rakı and

shoot off their guns. Bang, bang.

September comes and she’ll

                        again have

the pleasure of working for herself.

Naming Istanbul: IV

Bayram knows:

                             The kind, handsome chauffeur

of dark curls, firm biceps

                                                 and

12-hour workdays

                                      with a wife

and two kids

                               somewhere in Ümraniye.

He’s working toward a down payment

on unsightly government housing—

                   but m-o-d-e-r-n.

(No more uncle Abdullah, erstwhile contractor,

saving a few coins

                                by using sea sand in the

concrete mix.)

                               Bayram knows earthquakes

have standards.

Naming Istanbul: V

Feeding simit to seagulls

on the Kadikoy ferry

I pass a marble monument

standing on a breakwater.

What does it celebrate?

Those long-necked, barrel-chested cormorants

I suppose, standing on the stone

awkwardly flapping their wings.

Then one slips into the sea

And elegantly pokes around….

Wonderful! Dinner is served.

Soon I will meet you at Ciya

And eat remarkable mezes

in Asia

and watch you

in my private cinema

line-dancing with

everything

in this damn world.

(Dig how birds disappear

behind me as cloud cover

runs away with the sky.)

Istanbul Names: VI

My taxi driver, a thin,

young dude with aviator glasses

let’s rip about beautiful foreign chicks.

He hands me a blurry, twitching

image of digital phone coitus

and says, Russians girls, perfect.

I nod.

Sweat drips down my face.

He wags a finger.

“Turkish girls are yaramaz”—

wicked, useless, good-for-nothing, naughty.

What the hell does he mean?

(You’ll pay money to go somewhere and I’ll go there with you.

I’ll share secrets and you won’t forget who I am.)

Istanbul Names: VII

My neighbor, an antique dealer

has been grinding his broken teeth:

No one’s buying but for me

he has just the thing—

                                           a painting

of jets slamming into the Twin Towers.

I cannot tell him it’s grotesque

to see someone has painted flames

on the disaster,

and this is why I must photograph

this artifact.

(I would not want to hurt his feelings.

He’s always been hospitable.)

He says he shows it to all his friends.

I nod and nod and nod.

*

Jeffrey Kahrs has edited the Atlanta Review on Turkish Poetry and Cevirmi Edibiyati (Translated Literature). He’s been published in journals such Subtropics, Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, commonliinejournal.com, mediterranean.nu. and he had a chapbook published through Gold Wake Press. He was a winner of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Contest in 2012. His poem A Story, published in Solidarity Park Poetry, was translated into German, French, Italian and Turkish. Working with Hatice Oren, he’s also published translations of the Turkish poets Gultan Akin and Bechet Necatigil. His book One Hook at a Time on the history of commercial longline fishing in the North Pacific, was published in 2015.

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