Carl Boon: "BREAKING UP WITH PELİN"

A game of Uno gone awry,
a walk into the cold. One hears
the sobbing, the forlorn kitchen
asking questions to each:
what can’t belong here anymore
and what is wrong? In the quiet
of her sleep I used to fold
the dish towels, I used to stroke
her cat that lay in shadows
the stove made. I never woke her
though she begged to be the first
awake to make the tea, set my night-
sins at pleasing angles. I loved her,
but in Windmill City love
in every building drags open
the drapes until all is seen:
her pale blue pyjamas,
a stranger in the living room.
They whispered from the street
Turkish names for me
and I had no dictionary. All I had
was a thin girl growing thinner,
a dark and lonely staircase,
​and the scarlet stuff she discarded.

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 2016 and 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, Boon recently edited a volume on the sublime in American cultural studies.