Supplement
These flowers, the succulent razors
of their small faces, heavy as they
store honey, to be sucked and sucked
from under their petals which are
their faces that frown.
To suck uses two muscles in my
lips and unkissed neck. It passes this
unlicked space that should not be
saved for lilacs. That waits and waits
to be taken up like something at which
you look, because I want you
to look, to extend and kiss the tissue
of my back throat. Not to give me flowers.
Which I can’t eat or rob of clothes. Which
bodies I don’t lie against all these
days I spend for nothing.
You pressed the lilacs in my hand as an apology –
Take some time. I’ll need some too.
But I don’t need any time, it passes slowly
like rainwater in a palm frond. At one
point you will write and the sharp cup will decant,
so suddenly that I say the wrong thing.
But in between this and that there is an eon to wait
when I know exactly what I like: this,
your thin, your thin thin mouth,
your mangled nose, your you. Scented
wood and oranges in bed with me, but strong and
living, calling out my name. I can put the lilacs
on my shoulders, since it seems you like them,
and you can take from me the taste of plant-sucking.
Which in your absence I do. Their small
and weighty faces. With two lips and a tongue.
If I understood why you left me I would spit them
out like flies.
Lara Arikan is an Ankara-based poet and electronic musician. Some of her work has appeared in Bilkent University's weekly publication Bilkent News, for which she writes regularly as a columnist. One of her poems currently resides in Medusa's Laugh Press' microtext anthology 3. Others have been published in Typishly, the online literary journal; in the K'in Literary Journal; in the Cordite Poetry Review; in Persephone's Daughters; and in di-verse-city 2018, the youth anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival.