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Ozge Lena
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the poet
Özge Lena's poems have appeared in The London Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, Green Ink Poetry, harana poetry, Verse of April, Carmen et Error, The Phare, After..., The Selkie, Red Ogre Review and elsewhere. Her poem Celestial Body was picked for Flight of the Dragonfly Press' 2023 anthology Take Flight. Özge's poetry was shortlisted for both the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition in 2021, as well as for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023.
the poems
Rose Tragedy
Whenever I think of roses, I feel a palm
of thorns down my throat. I remember you.
Your last smile. I remember that June day.
That we were in the garden, drinking wine
the colour of the lonely rose. Deep, dangerous
magenta. That you were laughing. Then wind,
and a petal floated in the air before falling softly
into your glass. That it reminded me of something
that had thorns, something happened a long time
ago, some deep thing that pricked into my belly,
eating me from inside. That you took the dangerous
colour into your mouth. You chewed it to make me
laugh. Wet pieces on your teeth shone like jewels.
That you coughed. And you choked. Dark pink
foams burst out of your lips. Then the ambulance.
And the funeral. At last came the calm of autumn.
With me, alone in the garden. With a glass full
of innocent pink. With the thorns. I think of you
while spraying toxin to kill their larvae. Because once
a rose blooms, they grow eating its ovary from inside.
Amaranth
there it was
all of a sudden
in the middle of the city
bursting out asperous clusters
of extensions bleeding shamelessly
onto the pale ice like punctured lungs
/ you are in a collapsed world / you are in a fallen city in a collapsed world /
you are with the white death in a fallen city in a collapsed world
/ you are a hungry thing /
there it was
all of a sudden
in the middle of the city
blossoming amaranth veins
of extensions bleeding deathlessly
onto the pale ice like exploded hearts
/ you are a hungry thing running naked / you are running naked to run
into the last flower / imagine the taste of the last flower
/ imagine the sweet poison /
Last Summer Before
Seasons Disappeared
It was the summer of star shaped ice cubes
on your pink chest or between my breasts.
It was the summer of bottles of blushed wine
that we kept drinking from each others’ mouths
in the abiding afternoons when it was forbidden
to go out both by the doctors and the government.
It was the summer of daily curfews, of no work.
It was the summer of not knowing what to do
but to love each other and to hate each other
and to swim on one another’s aflame body
within cerise sheets, naked all day, hungry.
It was the summer of sirens, of announcements,
of heat-stricken bodies collapsing in the streets.
It was the summer of dust, the summer of lust
when your fingers were drawing love words
on my skin in a language that I didn’t know.
It was the summer of your going
out to buy another bottle of blush
and coming back later as a funeral.
It was the summer of knowing the world
was going to be the same never again,
that it was falling into a starry void,
falling free, forever,
just like me.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb