Ayşe Tekşen

Nilay

Nilay doesn’t know
I’ve been watching her,
dreaming about
her skin of pearls
and her hair
darker than
the nights of Arabia.
My eyes drinking
her delicate hands,
her silver polished fingers
typing lucky letters
on her gold iPhone.
How my heart leapt each time
she dropped her phone onto the desk!
Could she have noticed
how much I wondered
what made her so angry and unhappy,
how much I wanted to erase
all that sadness from her eyes?
For three whole hours,
I looked for a chance to tell her
how cute she looked
with her new haircut.
I know you will not
read this little poem,
but maybe one day—
if unicorns really exist,
this can happen too—
you will read all my poems.
Maybe one day
you will be mine.
As the Poet once told me,
a poem is a whisper to no one.
But this time
I want this to be my whisper.
Only a glimmer of voice
sent your way.
Or maybe not.
Maybe there’s even no Nilay.
Or Nilay is actually an Aleyna
or a Serdar.
Maybe the speaker is me
or maybe Him the Poet.
Does it even matter who is whom
if you’re not mine, Nilay?




Ayşe Tekşen  lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, and Dash. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Sincerely, The Courtship of Winds, Mizmor Anthology, and Deep Overstock.