Geese Besiege

After Fouad Elkoury, The Fur Coat, 1994.

We sit in our frozen home in the dark, windows broken. I lost my appetite long ago. We feed on cigarettes and vodka. Power is cut. We don’t bother to light candles, just sit face to face in the cyan blue waves of smoke, in silence. We listen to the late night bombardments. The giant fur coat my mother left sits on a third chair like a crippled beast. A mute witness to the moment of our break up. I remember how brutal she was. Brutal enough to wear the pain of a dead animal, you say. In the pale pink fog of dawn, I hang it out on the clothesline. Rising glamorously over the frosty mud of the yard, it sways like haunted. You stand behind it, in the ajar door. The geese see the beast, besiege it, they hiss. How could I leave you in the middle of a war?

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Özge Lena
Picture Fouad Elkoury, The Fur Coat, 1994

Biography: Özge Lena’s poems have appeared in The London Magazine, One Art, Orbis, 14 Magazine, Abridged, and elsewhere in various countries including the UK, USA, Canada, Singapore, Spain, Iceland, Serbia, France, etc. Özge’s poetry was nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize in 2021, then for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023,  and for the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize in 2024. Her poem “Here is a New Heart For You” was featured in the storefront of Barnes & Noble bookstore in Dublin, California for the National Poetry Month 2024.

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