Two Poems by Özge Lena

 

Autophagy

 

I talk about my feelings like they are pets—

tamed and innocent as if I’m never hungry

 

for my real self, never starving for a unique

reality, as if never wild. I have not ever tried

 

then failed to unwild them. Yet language

is a failure of the feeling as the feeling

 

is beyond any language, but think about it—

how majestic it would be to run to a beach

 

to collect pebbles one frozen morning,

instead to find an octopus bleeding indigo

 

whilst eating its own arm like the one

we watched in our last winter, tell me—

 

what would you name this feeling?

 

 

You Winged Thing

 

Like growing things, I grow

wings, transparent and iridescent

like an after-rain sky, sprouting out

from my scapulas that used to itch,

itch unbearably but one starry night,

on the tip of my fingers, I feel soft

feathers, silky and glorious as a new

born idea to make me scribble down

an aflame poem of passion on a piece

of black paper signed— I love you, you

winged thing, do not ever burn, glow only.

 

Özge Lena's poems have appeared in The London Magazine, iamb, Ink Sweat & Tears, Green Ink Poetry, Verse of April, Dark Winter, The Mantelpiece, Sky Island Journal, The Selkie, and elsewhere in various countries including the UK, the USA, Canada, Iceland, and France. She was nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poem "Celestial Body" was selected for Flight of the Dragonfly Press' 2023 anthology Take Flight. 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.