Penelle Magazine

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Three Poems

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At the Hammam in Beyoğlu with Nadine Slick, the twisting side streets as we lose our way in the rain, stop for lunch under a color-threaded canvas, eating Dolma and Köfte with local-like confidence. Nadine finds the door, stooped below street level and standing in springtime puddles. Slick, the celadon and lapis tiles glossy smooth their surface, misting in steam as Nadine pours cold water over the heated stones, as I look out the high window trying to quell rising claustrophobia and notice mirrored beads of sky-water above on the pane. Slick, my luminous and significant body scrubbed silky, polished to raw pink as the natır who is not embarrassed holds my arm high and scrubs coarsely, and I have been braver than Nadine who does not want to be seen like this, but I am still sucking it in. after, we have apple çay and take the ferry home and retreat to our expat flats where Nadine goes to a book and I go to a Turk in my bed, our affair too Slick with language limitations for any real staying power.
Pascha Celebrations in Râmnicu Vâlcea Mihnea asks if we have these things in America, insert anything we happen to be looking at for the moment. And Sasha says with her prudent eyes to hush for a moment, her careful reckonings so sisterlike to my years of studying, balancing my siblings, my own self against their abacuses. The country here is not unfamiliar, I can feel the homeness when the spirit settles in a land; buoyant light on sinuous water, juice green banks, pink Magnolias in this old-world place cousin, or at least family to the overlarge, creamy Magnolias of my girlhood Welcome to Durant, the Magnolia Capitol of Oklahoma And here I’m meeting myself again in a new forest as intimate to me as those first five wooded acres. Mihnea fizzles, sparkling in trivia sentences and comic book colors, Hristos a înviat! as he thwacks his egg against mine, fracturing shell each time and tells me to eat more sugar-dense Cozonac, whirlpooling on my tongue in taste memory. What better encomium than to be told as I slide into the backseat you smell like coffee and brown sugar.
Airport Bound on a Business Trip He looks nothing like my own grandfather with his curly white head, shorter than me even, diminutive olive fingers— but he smells exactly like Poppaw did when he was alive. What goes into old man cologne that makes it so nostalgic, secure, aged watches and peanut brittle? Spicy warm and muted wood. Anyway, my taxi driver this morning... his private smile and the swaying Quran ornament, blue tasseled, hang from the rear-view mirror and contrast against the sounds of Smells Like Teen Spirit blasting from the radio, his head almost imperceptibly bumping to the rhythm, outward decorum suppressing the inner head banger. People are like this of course, the inside never what appears on the box. In fact, it’s rare, an exception when one of us matches all the listed ingredients, consistent with the label. In his car, we are both wearing green in earth-mirroring shades, nothing too neon or artificial. I wonder in what other ways we are alike: generous when sprinkling with cinnamon, prone to add an extra ice cube or a dash of salt for good measure, middle children lost in the noise-chaos of overlarge families, animal lovers, conflict avoiders— or how this morning we are both stuck where we don’t want to be, traveling reluctant miles in the opposite way, wishing perhaps for the luxury of unhurried sunshine—dreams of a stone house in orange light, resplendent in the soft texts of a page, breathing beneath birdsong.

Lydia Renfro holds an MFA from Adelphi University and is the recipient of the Donald Everett Axinn Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Okie Bookcast, Litro US, Red Fern Review, Level Land: Poems For and About the I35 Corridor, Siblini Journal, Miletus International Literature Magazine, and others. Raised on the Great Plains of Oklahoma, Lydia currently lives in Colorado with her dog.

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