The world isn’t real. The homelands are a trap. The tricks with which a place can lure you in. Some nimbus clouds that imprison you, a shooting star. The space so fragile, gluing every two things between you and everything else. Your mother warning you of the beasts in the woods, the chimeras that assume the shape of men. A man is a baby is a wound. A man is a world that swallows you whole, a red ant that nips at your bloodied toes. Your sleep is deeply troubled, your dreams sold to a troubled soul. This is your new life, the soul insists. This is the home you want to keep. You listen to the trees moaning at night, carry their whispers through the wind.

The world isn’t real, but the cold, hard truth of your door cracks open, fills your room with all the untold lies. You watch the beast take one long step into the house. You hold your breath. You’re just excited to see someone other than you breathing under the same roof. Someone who says he likes you dearly. Who says his heart belongs with you and you only. A home can be anywhere with warmth and affection in it—a cloud, a quartz, a leaf. All hard yet indifferent. A home with many rooms and no windows. Their walls, a burning oven. A bed full of spikes. His smell, musky and stale with sweat. You open a button, then two. A full gown.

The world isn’t real, just as the bead of sweat that dribbles down your midriff. Heat crawling up your neck, then the shoulders. The world goes mute outside the windows of your body. Your body is a trap, one that devours intimacy. Plural. Fierce. Distant. At home, facing a coppice of naked trees, you become a bird for me, perching on an unshapely rock. The world is silent, at your feet. Just some wind and clouds and salty, stingy air, filling your lungs, burning your chest with yearning.

– Sarp Sozdinler