Finders Keepers
By Özge Lena
• • •
We saw the first horse
tongue nailed on a door
with a falling red arrow
pointing at the transparency
crept all over the ice-stroke city.
Slippery.
tongue nailed on a door
with a falling red arrow
pointing at the transparency
crept all over the ice-stroke city.
Slippery.
Second one was stuck on a broken
traffic sign. The third was needled
on the ragged curtains of a wrecked
house. One was there sticking out
of a cracked shop window.
One on a damp wall,
on a pierced roof,
on the edge
of a well.
Seven silent tongues we had,
with seven arrows, all red,
all shooting
down.
They cried in the blood-dark
vortex of the night, they
cried like newborns
until the cutting
cold of the dawn.
Whistling with
the blizzards
they cried like singing,
seven times: finders
keepers, losers
weepers…
In the morning we left seven sugar
cubes to the points arrows
aimed at.
For a bought silence of sugar-white.
At noon we dug really hard
but we could never find
the heads.
We lost the game.
• • •
Özge Lena is a writer & poet based in Istanbul. Her poems have appeared in various countries including the USA, the UK, Canada, Iceland, Serbia, and France. She was nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Özge's poetry was shortlisted for the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition in 2021, as well as for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023, and Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize in 2024. Her poem “Here is a New Heart For You” was featured in the storefront of Barnes & Noble bookstore in Dublin, California for the National Poetry Month 2024.
X (Twitter): @lenaozge
