Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Posit, The Maine Review, and Diagram. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Boon recently edited a volume on the sublime in American cultural studies.
Hot
It is very hot and I am not
going to tell you you are beautiful
and I am not going to say I’m impressed
because you’ve read Proust or Goethe
or even weary Dostoyevsky who
contemplated certain corners
of the universe in worn boots.
It is very hot and you are not
more beautiful than Merve who
checks my eggs and beer and detergent
through register 3 at the grocery
and writes heartfelt letters to a man
in Bursa that say the weather is hot
and I am not as beautiful as you who
crosses the shadows of the Ulu Mosque,
a shadow yourself in dark clothes.
It is very hot and you don’t matter
and maybe I don’t matter
but a brick falls and a bat swallows
two or more mosquitoes and maybe
everything is just all right.
Metonymies
My father became a blue suit
that smelled of tobacco and mint.
My mother had a body, but she
became a library book, a mystery—
ink and use and coffee with milk.
They spoke adult things while I
rearranged my Legos into a thousand
definitions of what might be.
I was carpeting becoming cologne,
and that bad gum smell in packs
of baseball cards. Only later I’d be
the avocado lotion of the girl
I loved, and she a home long after
it had burned. On those summer days
when the frequent swallows tore
against the sky, we all were lake-
water and Welch’s grape juice,
and the plastic that seals tubs
of Reiter sour cream. My father
heaped it on his baked potato, feeling
sad, the jazz in his skull blooming
then fading. After dinner, dishes,
my mother rose, Dean Koontz
in her hand, the smell of impatiens
everywhere inside the Ohio dark
as the city gassed the mosquitoes
and that gas made us all the same—
doubts and intrigues and flesh.