By SELMA ACAR
Girls are strung along the meandering banks of the Delaware and Gediz rivers.
Conceived as a foolish gudgeon bait fish, removed from the womb with their fists clenched.
Have you ever held your death warm in your palms?
We grace death each month and wonder why we lean towards gravestones.
The girls of Anatolia relinquish life to be suspended amidst their past and fate.
Their predestined birthright is the ultimate end.
Devoid of warmth, her palms shrivel in her prime.
The girls snap and play, “Look at me and tell me if you’ve known me before.”
Experts on the works of the hand and the forms of the body.
Labors of dried peppers tethered through string and lined up on unfinished rooftops.
Red pines have absolved last summer’s smoldering mountains.
The drought has ceased, but our girls were never afforded their youth.
The fish is too mature to be cast off into the current yet too youthful to be devoured.
She yearns to be caught— a preemptive liberation.
Their tongues remain fixed to memory and don’t budge for a verse of poetry.
Who isn’t enamored by the tongueless fawn?
The illiterate women of Anatolia march to the preacher’s home in lowly wrung pants that drape their hips like a skirt. The hand-laced edges of their headscarves drape across their shoulders and are polished with a modest knot tied over the tips of their chins. They roam the discrete backroads and float like white crows.
The Turks conquered their towns and pitched tents in their squares without erecting a statue. The girls who skipped across Gediz tributaries eating tomatoes plucked fresh off the branch are said to have learned how to preserve sauce from the Greeks. They live on streets named after national resistance movements against the occupation of cities named after brotherly love.
Impoverished husbands are conscripted for the independence war and construct concrete homes atop Byzantine fortresses upon their return as a sort of protest. The women of Anatolia never live to see the view of the layered stonework from below. The ramparts of empires stand upright, yet we have been abandoned with our tongues in their hands.
What did we do to our girls? What have they done to the sacred trust of language?
An ancestral curse forsakes the women of Anatolia.
Mothers of martyrs, daughters of victims, and butchers of the sacrificial lamb.
Pariahs of their homeland, beholden to patterns and severed from progress.
The Turks taught them to surrender as a means of righteousness and justice.
What prevails is an inhumanity more rotten than individuality.
The illiterate woman made to fortune ancestors and service heirs struggles to break a smile as her mind departs. A futile woman destined for ignorance begins to crack. These women only learn how to curse and weep once they arrive at the doorstep of death. Their laughter flows unrestrained at the loss of life.
There are no illusions in the decaying mind.
Her cheekbones are chiseled by the folds of her headscarf framing her sunken face. Shoulders carved smooth in marble. Named after Artemis and Helen. Those who tie wishes on boughs at the revered virgin’s shrine reap The Most Venerable of her joy. Damned is the nation that violates our most holy relics.
The end is always looming for those who were never given a life of their own. The first sign of aging for the young girl is a catalyst for their impending death. At 64, they manifest their deaths in repeated utterances, moaning, “I will not live to see tomorrow.” The illiterate women endure for yesterdays of a bygone history recited and invoked in prayer.
Broken down and rested on supports, nothing remains of the women when their provisions cease. Only a few plots of dried-out vineyards fall into the arms of those awaiting their inheritance. Incapacitated by the father’s hand and constrained to the fate of a child.
When did they live that they so eagerly anticipate death?
The illiterate women learn to read calligraphic inscriptions as wrinkles subsume their eyes.
Foreign brushstrokes are illegible signifiers– the only literature they come to know.
Incapable of writing Philadelphia in their native tongue,
The woman of Anatolia stutters as she mutters the letters of her name.
Wild rue foraged from the ruderal arteries of cemeteries,
Smudged inside, its smoke is said to ward off evil.
How can we avert the devil’s gaze if he’s already inside the house?
The home is a facade for his burrow dug generations prior.
Embedded into the fabric of the nation,
Burdened to birth the strategic defeat of language,
A stranger to her land, a wanderer of the banks,
The women of Anatolia regenerate the soil with tears.
The decaying mind is a miscarriage.
Writer | Selma Acar ’27 | sacar27@amherst.edu
Editor | Sarria Joe ’27 | sjoe27@amherst.edu
Artist | Hannah Kwon ’27 | hwkwon27@amherst.edu