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.
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.