On the seventieth anniversary of Ataturk’s death I was in the mountains between Van and Diyarbakir with a baby on my lap and her three year old brother stretched out on the seat behind me while their mother tried to sleep, the silk scarf slipping from her hair.

After my brother’s ten-minute soliloquy on Karl Popper, I had lost track of his connection with George Soros or Georgia.

y November you already thought of returning,
rubbing Vaseline into your palms and the crevices
of your cracked heels. No napalm rained down in a foreign land,
no birth dates streamed across the screen to push our brothers into war.