Leyla ÇOLPAN is a Turkish-American poet and translator based in London, UK, and Pittsburgh, USA. Ze has been awarded fellowships by the University of Pittsburgh and The Adroit Journal for hir poetry, which considers Anatolian folk traditions, literary discourses between East and West, queer visibility, vulnerability, and epistemology, as well as the first locations of queer and trans in the Muslim literary canons. Ze was awarded the 2020 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry by Kazim Ali, and hir work has been anthologized in Best New Poets. Ze is the author of the chapbook What Passes & What Passes Through (Ghost City Press, 2020), and hir work appears elsewhere in numerous online and print publications. Ze will receive hir MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2023.

leylacolpan@protonmail.com
@leylacolpan

Changing Names

Thinking I would set the unlucky
cricket of my pulse down in his hand;

thinking Yes! this is the hand! and my pulse
is like a cricket but could be—

Actually be!—the cricket; thinking
he could dissolve the latex bounce

of simile that says finally
what a thing is not and give to impulse

form; thinking even if form is a kind of untruth,
untruth could be concave, hollow-with, quiver

for the arrows of his sight; thinking What
if what I’d wanted wasn’t sight but to collect and turn

sight back; thinking his hand closing could compress
the pulse into a lens; thinking Change does

make the body precious—when he said baby, meaning novelty,
I was hearing rasa, already ironing myself out.

Whose eyes then had watched the white palm humming up the white parallel bands of my leg.

Goethe’s Theory of the Simorgh

Out, already, from the west the snowlight
has come crawling,
unsupported, through a knot of crows, to hang

like a beetle wing would hang—sheerly,
iridescent, through force of its own will, the wrong way up—
from the white gypsum of my lintel.

It was Newton, not Goethe,
who imagined colour might be knitted, too, from slenderness
into slenderness—from needles, light bending through their razor-

fine stitch—who saw the preserved peacock’s feather
would not be broken further by inspection.
But in Goethe’s eyes, that tryer, even dead colours were beating,

and no whiteness, no candour could be broken,
only, by watching, beautifully bent—as when snow caught
against a window, as if by surprise, uncoils

faintly out in yellow-blue sheets—
as when, each winter, against stark western light,
the crows evacuate my city.

Their feathers, too, might be rippling, chrysochlorous—light
upon light—from the shifting angles of my window—or fixed like charcoal
to the eyes that watch them from beneath.

You would think someone were, somewhere, burning—
trying to burn—
what could have otherwise been called a rainbow.

And why should feathers make plain with colour
their tiny, interior geometries—
volition suggesting, prematurely, flight—

Why should the poet, watching, imagine only needles,
disappearing in the scalpel of her sight?
Sharp bird, you have your own colour. You are not blunted

by any colour of the earth.
The winter sky is full
of nicks,

that wink noisily open overhead—out of reach,
yet still asking me to stretch my fingers through them.
Between white snow, refracting,

and white smoke, refracting, there is a candour
that could unstitch thirty colours from each crow.
It is not the simple mirror that can break you.

from Conference of the Birds

…the fire you dwell in will bloom into a garden.

Farid ud-Din Attar, Mantik’ut Tayr, c. 1100

2

Outside the red wings of the arson, birds
were entering and exiting themselves.

In Attar’s country we attended their movement
as a kind of speech.
In our country—who can say?

Only, from the matchbox-red mince
of the red house in the red country and its matchbox-
red throat, lifting not the house

but the outline
of the house, that birds turn a slow circle.
Dark letter in dark air.

The letter changes as you fix your mouth to speak it.
The birds circle.
The house burns.
You keep looking for the words.

3

Police were burning
sirens on the hill. As they watched
their country steep the house in arson,
you lay sleeping, and, waking, counted
thirty wings inside the smoke.

4

Only birds had watched you, singing
of remembrance.
So your speech grew feathers and remembered.

5

Forgetting you, the country called you magpie,
plucking at the carrion of language,
puppeting the skin of another—
Magpie who talks in pieces,
who would spill—they said—himself
like naphtha in the cipher
of a burning house—
what could he know of singing?

You rubbed soot into your chest,
recalling: crow, then smoke, then flee, then flight.

9

Whether, like moths, the birds had migrated
to the fire, or had grown out from it—who can say?

Only, west-easterly, between not countries
but the names
of countries, that they moved.

10

Hiding himself among them, the magpie
had sought not the fire, but the bird living in the centre of the fire,
who, like Sankofa, says death is revision,
and revision is looking again.

18

The magpie here called you had been called also

Tiresias, whose sex crumbled
in the white-hot palm of god;

Tiresias, eyes snuffed by their reflection in the torso
of the goddess;

Tiresias, avispex, he-she who saw no colour
but the birds, who singed their speech
into hir memory of the future;

Tiresias, he-she steeped in naphtha,
in the thick and terrible wetness of the fire.

19

Was ze then flushed out or was smoked out
Was ze made clean again or else made bare—

Magpie, you
who sang such clever things,
how can you say nothing?

20

fieldfare finch firethroat falcon feeding
refeeding fulminant ferrous—

in the sense of female—phases facie—in the sense of prima—
famished—in the sense of absence—

figuration—in the sense of trans—aphasia in the sense of
Why didn’t you say anything—

family—in the sense of service—familiar
in the sense of You should have known—famine

field fallow feckless—in the sense of boys will be—
flaming—

in the sense of tinder—factory, olfactory—
in the sense of burning flesh—

30

Outside the red wings of the arson, you
forget familiar speech.
The house—a matchstick hieroglyph.

A blackened mirror lies out in the yard and you look
down—your maternal line
widening with silence

looks out of it to meet you,
casts the daylight’s thirty colours back
against your face. Magpie,

many years ago from now,
you won’t wear strangers’ colours,
you won’t pluck at strangers’ tongues.

31

If the house had burned it was no fire to read you.
Soot clings under our fingers,
already buzzing with its own queer light.