By Kate Romney Johnson
The street was so full I wasn’t sure where my heart began and where my skin ended. The smell was more than I could fit in my nose. I felt that I had lost and found some inner secret, the taste of flowers and a rustling of blue fabrics, woven rugs redder than a rush of blood, an imprint of cumin and cinnamon, cloves and cardamom, some tautness of the tendons in my heels, the plodding and plopping of every step past simit and pide, peppers and persimmons, lavaş and baklava dripping in syrup. I did not want to sense the sides of myself, to know what of me started and stopped. I wanted to become a dance of flushed gum flak and the pooling of saliva, some flowing and gulping, only embodiment. But it was not my land nor yours, you who had vowed to love me, and we had no right to pull it ferociously into our bodies, swallow it. All we could claim here was each other, some moment in our nest of sheets growing yellowed from too many washes, in our rented room overlooking the mosque, long hairy leg warmth slipped beneath covers, your icicle toes reaching towards me. It was not in the market that I felt some drifting holiness between us. In your arms, I breathed it and held my breath as the cobbled streets echoed with the call to evening prayer, some ancient call to come home.
