65 m.y.a. + Three More

BY ISABELLA TURCINOVIC

65 m.y.a.

 

Light comes to catch wing

arthritic ends hardened

similar to  Pachycephalosaur. Crown

for the reptile a head ever-changing,

no three species. Ditto for Triceratops.

 

Tyrannosaurus roamed the interior forests

with ever-elongating femurs

knobby skin and scavenging.

Setting sun over the Greater Interior Seaway,

splitting the North American sub-continent

rising above the Serengeti

to cicadas and choruses

decomposing earth.

---

 

Kandahar, a sparknotes love poem.

 

Founded by great Alexander, such a worldly conquest.

Fought over after death, a fulcrum for empire’s powers

generals dreaming for unequaled strength.

 

Arab caliphates with Islam clattered in

carrying resplendence in religion. Adding geometric arts

high crescent domes to Hellenistic faces.

 

Ibn Battuta saw your face during worldly wandering

some three days walk from Ghazni,

large and sparkling under the Timurids.

 

Mughal and Persian empires fought over the silks

of strategic positioning. Recorded those epic memories

in Qandahar-nama, old tales of magnificent deaths.

 

Mirwais Hotak revolted against Persia:

quick heartbeats and singed gun smoke.

Kandahar burnished into the throne of Afghanistan.

 

Britain: steeped in colonialism like their teas

from the conquered. Desiring Afghanistan as an India,

subdued by parasols and tired corsets sweat-stained with sun.

 

Colonial armies fortified inside the city: war

with the Afghans, again, for guns and people to cry

obedience to mother re-established. Instead: forced out

 

like Soviets years later, Kalashnikovs and ideological

recruits instead of riflemen in red, fleeing

in tanks, Pakistani and U.S.-paid mujahidin.

 

Kandahar tired after violence from her people,

walls kept under boots of young Russian commies,

American slang condescending as they wage proxy wars.

 

Gul Agha Sherzai held you in arms, lament the loss

of the heroic battle, substituted with civil war. Cries of people

and rockets, no more storied tales of death.

 

Exodus of comrades and civilians, fleeing the white flag blotched

with black of Taliban. Years later, those misguided mujahidin

surrendered you, to Sherazi, to America.

 

Afghanistan’s heart: grand marble facades, monuments to great war’s

leaders, airports built by Americans and Soviets. An empire’s

bedrock prized for reasons divorced from truth.

---

 

an address to Nobody:

 

This bouquet of flowers will wilt

on their lower edges.

Red yellow green

smell autumnal.

Fragile ends of summer.

 

The pictured corkboard in my room

National Geographic war zones,

zones of peace bordering war.

Syrian boy thrown to the air by the father

a field of full ripe blooms–

tomatoes, plump balloons satisfied

somewhere in refuge in Jordan.

Next: Lagosian parties

powerful women in purple.

 

Nobody, imagine: great-grandmother

leaning on the proverbial ship, searching

to wed Person A who delivered

Person B, a marriage gift in reverse.

 

My room is cold-smelling.

Fresh sheets and citrus lotions

in two perfumes, overpowering pepper.

Slipping between late nights

notebooks weary.

Classical station bouncing loud and soft.

That definite hum.

 

Nobody, is this fate–

wed to the proper noun while looking

always for the second. To reconcile

nouns (all) all are tied to.

 

What’s left of it all:

a bewilderment that takes away

clever formations of thought.

What’s left: observations

mundane and old-known.

 

In truth I am killing time

waiting for my mother to sleep.

---

 

In half-sleep

 

life collected

first pregnancies

in heavy anticipation.

 

pauses

of a lacrimosa

 

*

 

and from waves

vision-based worlds

 

universe batting

in/out

 

photon strips on the screen

 

*

 

a parenthetical hemming

such science insisting:

 

be ignored.

 

in the beginning

lilt-up, tragedy

in sound

metronomic.

 

*

 

this science

advanced life

 

things of progress

post.

 

born swamped

in hypocrisy

 

rebirths of fortune:

“the black plague was chill”

 

*

 

death-life conundrum

 

quantum physics

reflects itself.

 

*

 

rapture an elegy

giving up.

 

charms of finality

stop-and-go

the closing

About the Author

Isabella Sophia Turcinovic is currently a 12th grader in Austin, Texas. Poetry has become a way for her to craft her love for international policy in a non-essay form. Writing poetry has continually intrigued her, as it allows for a complex intersection between the rational and the emotion that is fun to explore.