Poems – Omen, IT, Parra Lake

OMEN A TANKA

A garbage bag flaps Its arms in the wind like a Dealership tube-man. A magpie watches, knowing Full well it’s on borrowed time.

PARRA LAKE AN ODE

THE road chokes the lake — Its sooty film stains the land Still holy beneath. A bell bird still sings an Orphic Ode in vain over loud trucks.

Poems by Eren Yilmaz

IT

There is another world, and it is in this one. – Paul Eluard

IT WAS THERE that night at the Easter Show, inside the Dirty Tricks showbag, inside that, a camera that squirted water and a bottle of vanishing ink. I smelled it in the dark aroma of Turkish coffee, my auntie telling me stories on the sofa. I saw it glisten in wisps of vapour, when the bartender dropped ice in a glass – a bourbon and coke

and behind the bar on shelves of glass, coloured bottles danced in the mirror. I felt it in school, in Healthy Harold’s dark theatrical bus. I found it on the library shelf, inside a book of Persian history, far older than the library: pencilled notes that told me to read the book beside this one.

I learned it, in a solo game of Chinese whispers I’ve been playing since I was a boy, the players of the game, a chain of my past selves – The phrase, a trace of memory now:

That door to another world you found with your cousin in the yard is real, don’t forget it.