By Meryem Rabia Uzumcu
Legacy of an incarcerated woman in Anatolia
At first glance I am a change purse.
I perform requiring neither a zipper nor lock to seal my lips shut.
My vessel is tossed aside by those who see me not for what I am:
a testimony to ordinary violence.
My mystery contains the story of my maker.
I hold her years here in my pouch.
In her jail cell a woman sewed on canvas cloth: a muted red, yellow, and green lipped tulip.
The year 1963 beaded blue below her design.
Her needlework sits painfully on the skin of my belly.
I know intimately without seeing my reflection that a series of tight knots produced too lovely a
tableau.
Decades carried me along only to abandon me in a crammed toy box full of neglected legos
and abused plastic dolls.
Taking refuge in a corner far away from stroppy childrens’ appetites for dismembering plastic
limbs, I mourned.
One day, a gentle touch awakened me from an almost forgotten existence...
She inquired about me to the old woman I dwelled with since losing my mother.
It was the first time I had heard my name in years.
Now I am displayed in a strange room for the same face that examines and pinches me open
for longed answers.
I cannot help but laugh at her perplexed state.
My quiet teases her troubled curiosity.
If only the torture of this guise could cease with a chat over çay as we sit with our aches for our
makers.
çay = tea
When the other shoe drops
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
Please don't Rumi-splain to me.
Life’s ocean is an unexpected visitor
She won’t knock twice,
but floods open crevices presumed for breath
She tosses her victims wildly with rambunctious might and sandy grit
And suddenly subsides so cooly, any tattered survivor’s head would swell to think
cunning wit alone lulls a churlish charmer. Such nerve!
May tomorrow’s yolky sunset blanket beams over shivering skin
when all but salt stains vanish into vapor.
Pray the clouds of old wet memories don’t cast deformed
shadows on precious leaves anew
Because even if we are the ocean, a drop knocks us down in just one “thud.”
About the Author
M. Rabia is a writer and audio storyteller based in Brooklyn, NY. A wide range of diasporic lexicons allow her to creatively re-member fragmented family oral histories of folklore and ordinary life in Bitlis, Diyarbekir, and Konya. A graduate of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies at NYU, she will join the Fall 2021 Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Ph.D. cohort at Rutgers University.