Editor’s Note: On mobile devices, these poems are best read on landscape view.
The Grand (Ba)Bazaar
Come around! Today we gather to watch my mother
give away his socks, his shoes, like a robot, vacantly
face his suits, have you—my uncles— try on Baba’s sweaters
try on Baba’s slacks and cut them off too soon, saving the fabric
around the knees. There is more that
you must take, in the back of the closet his smell lingers in.
Check back there, in the boxes, look behind his saved birthday cards
there are more ties from his daughters, and find
more that you can take, please take the saved cards from
boxes, take everything and leave his wife
nothing. Everything must go!
Channels on a TV for the Dead
The water hits my collarbone / trickles inward to my chest / sleds down between my muddy
breasts / I run my fingers through my hair / and tell him about Mother’s new job / how she cuts
her own hair now / and sells houses too / how she grows grape tomatoes in the kitchen / and
paints the walls with the peels / I talk to him until I don’t // What if he can’t hear me / can he see
me / is a father allowed to watch his daughter in the shower / is it inappropriate as both a human
and a ghost / does Heaven censor / are my breasts black boxes in Heaven / or does he just close
his eyes / would they trust people to / is there a way for him to listen if he cannot see / a Heaven
radio / there must be / How does he hear both my sister and me / can he record channels / or must
he choose between blood / Was he on my channel for the poems I read to him in the shower / my
renditions of Patrick Watson / my kisses into the wet steam
My Mother Used Her Kohl’s Cash to Buy Her Husband’s Urn
What I remember most from the nights is how they were the same as his mornings. What I
remember most from his mornings is that they were still coming. There is no remembrance
without pain. Pain from either the wish of re-living it or the memory itself. Sometimes when I
want to feel alive I remember the dead. The stillness of his bones enough to use mine to run.
The hollowness of his sunken chest enough to rumble my breaded stomach. My father chose
silence long before he knew he would live in it. He changed from what he chose to be into the
only thing he would be. It is one thing to lose a blood love but it must be another to lose a love
made by choice. My mother chose to place his lungs in rice long before the doctors decided to
tease the tumor. Let the grains pull out the chicken stock from its veins long before she stopped
cooking. My father was a quiet man. He liked porch swings and warm pastries. He didn’t buy
anything he didn’t need and always woke up with enough time to eat a long breakfast. A man
once called my father an honest man. His sentence is the only one I remember from the funeral.
Or the visitation. I can’t remember which one we say it was when consoling our Muslim family
that he was buried when he had begged to be burnt. His ashes rest in a large picture frame urn
in our living room. My mother used her Kohl’s Cash to buy her husband’s urn. What I remember
most from the mornings following his death is how my mother woke with her wedding band. He
wore his even when his finger melted to the size of a smoothie straw. What I remember most
from watching his rest was knowing how much he wasn’t there and how people aren’t always
where they appear to be. I wondered which world his thoughts had him in, or whether he had any
thoughts at all. I wondered if he wished to be here, or already gone, or whether he was waiting
for us to be ready. He waited until two days after his birthday, until we had all eaten a long
breakfast and came to sit at his bedside at noon. He had always been thoughtful in that way.
Ceren Ege is a Turkish-American poet currently based in Massachusetts, where she works at the Attorney General’s Office to help advocate for affordable energy. She gripped onto poetry as a safe practice of self-care around the time her father's cancer tightened its grip into metastasis. Ceren continues to write to normalize conversations of grief and loss, especially during COVID-19 when everyone has grieved the loss of something—a person, place, amenity, or an idea of how life would be. Advocacy and social justice draw her to one day practice law, while creative writing keeps her soft in a world bedecked with adversities that tempt us to harden. Her poems in The Normal School are attempts to untangle grief, acknowledgements of her father's life, of the shared pains that allow us to connect, and a proposition that we should. Her poetry appears in the Fall 2021 Issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and has previously won a Hopwood Undergraduate Award and the Arthur Miller Award through the University of Michigan's Hopwood Program.
Instagram: @cernege
Facebook: facebook.com/ceren.ege.7