The fig is an inverted flower.
The female fig wasp breaks
her wings to enter the unpollinated fig.
After de-winging herself, she pollinates carpet walls and lays her eggs.
Ficain on exoskeleton, she poisons herself.
Corpse dissolves into fig, corpse pools over her eggs, she feeds a colony and a tree.
The difference between dead and corpse.
Some years ago, I stood over a cadaver, in a prospective medical school.
I smelt like formaldehyde for how many days after?
Once there were brains in the shelves of the research center
I worked in. The walnut bodies
floated in chemicals. Sometimes,
the walnut in my head floats in booze.
Sometimes, the walnut in my head sinks into my spine.
Sometimes, the walnut in my head is gone.
The walnut in my head floats a centimeter above my skull.
I heave on the floor. I sound like a panicked squirrel.
I pound my open hands, tile floors, green and purple, obscene fit, itch.
Sometimes, in the aphasia research center,
when I was the only one working there,
I would open the cabinet stacked with brains and
listen to each one recalling refrigerator magnets, scalpel snips, and
the smell of chestnuts roasting on coal stove, and a scent
like cloves. According to some interpretations
of the Quran: Adam and Hawa both ate what
they were not supposed to eat together, that the fruit was not
a fruit but an inverted flower.
I suck on the ribs of lime wedges wedged on the brim,
I never sinned, though I showered myself
in sugar crystals, silkworms, crushed mint.
Did I learn the word for naked?
Çıplak Adem. Çıplak Havva.
According to some interpretations, the angels on my shoulders
morphed into fig wasps. A woman from Germany wore a wooden
ring and gave Turkish women in Maryland a sermon.
She said it was never about figs, or the tree,
or iblis, or the leaves that fed the fig, said some scholars
supposed it could have been a pomegranate, clustered
grapes, or wheat,
said they always want to know what kind of fruit, or how many leaves on
that forbidden tree, or what Adam said, or how Hawa covered herself
smelling like fear, or the fall into the hungry belly of earth, or whether
satan was a snake, serpent, or man
and I listened to her. I listened
to her like my life depended on it.
I keep the yazma with flowers crocheted on borders as
a tarp over my easel.
I used to wear that yazma at night afraid of wasps burrowing
in my ears, afraid of corners where jinns built whole cities,
always afraid of the smell of my own flesh after an empty
night of prayers.
Yazma, bunuda yazma. Boncuklu tığ oyası.
Kalbimin kumaşını oyan hoyrat cuma akşamları.
