The Ali Baba Restaurant (Midnight in Narlikuyu)

 By John Hilla

Children over our shoulders like rumpled jackets, we

navigate damp stairs, down to the long table beside

the water, ringing the cove, to sit under

            flowers.

Restaurants ring this bay, their candles a wreathe,

arms encircling dark water, flickering through salt air,

the glow of luminous fishing floats further out upon

            the tail of the Mediterranean.

We drape the kids over the middle chairs: Nora,

Osman, Zehra, the last secretly awake, smiling at her

hidden joke, and we orient ourselves at their borders

while the waiter arrives with small plates—

            tomatoes, cucumber, feta, salata,

lemons,

            raki.

            The fish is chosen by those who know from a case

fogged with last breath: not I, busy with my glass, raki

just to there, evet, water, lutfen, and ice:

            tesekurrler.

Water laps up over the stones, the nose of my shoe is damp,

and tiny fishes tumble across broad stones, dim with

moss but green in the restaurant light.

Beside my sleeping daughter, my wife laughs.

Ayşe nearby has muttered the trigger, but her

own grin is tight, lacking the flash of a bulb to excuse its

force, her blue eyes catching the candles but holding

this truth: she is alone here.  

The fish arrives, ringed in parsley, wedged, its last

shock cooked into permanence, and Evren, across from me,

is weakly blue, alone with her cell, alone with Yusuf, who,

having beckoned the fish, joins her in texting—who?

            At midnight.

Marooned in English, acquainted with raki, I am holding

my daughter's hand and staring at the eyelash fishes

when the turtle

            wafts into view, blown into the light

by the sea's ebb and draw, three feet long, a glide,

a turn, 

            a moment,

and then gone.

My heart is missing. There is a turtle shell cavity

in my desert, and I am standing without understanding

why.

She is awake, my daughter, my onion, my emerald,

and I shoulder her to peer with me into the sea,

            only nothing remains

but stone.

*

John Hilla is a Detroit, Michigan-based attorney, poet, and comedian. A dual Turkish citizen, he formerly edited and published Rebel Route Magazine ("Rock & Roll, Past & Present") and has published poetry in The 3288 Review, The Wayne Literary Review, and Enlish. His poem "Decision" will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Cimmarron Review.

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