Sarp Sozdinler
1. THE DISPATCHConfessions
Father,
I'm afraid of: Long nights like this. I’m afraid of pain, but not death. I’m afraid of sadness and the sense of abandonment. I'm afraid of dogs, because they don't understand me, and I don’t understand them. I am afraid of feeling hollow, the perpetual loneliness, and the loss of family and friends. I am afraid of getting older, that other people would try and make a mother out of me. I am afraid of uncertainty, disorganization, and anarchy. I’m afraid of misunderstandings. I am afraid of people who believe they hold the absolute truth. I am afraid of their steel beliefs and discipline. I’m afraid of all the homelands that would take me but fail to ease my suffering. I’m afraid of becoming an important person one day. I’m afraid of my own skin, and of all the shades it holds. I am afraid of certain heights, open windows, and terraces with unsound railings. Of children lurking under. I am afraid of stupidity, lack of common sense, and foolishness, each spreading like a virus all around me. I am terrified that everyone I know will be gone before me, and that I’ll be forgotten soon after.
I have: A weak memory and a small house. I have some white silk stockings. I have a wardrobe in which I keep a pearl rosary and my first tooth, blue and old, like the gates of heaven. I have matching mitts, socks, carpets, dreams, sorrows, and trinkets of nostalgia, each in its designated drawer. I have a broken rocking chair, a lame stool, and many books without covers. I have a crooked pinky finger. I have an artificial belly button that the doctors worked for eight hours straight to sew on. I have a stiff neck, two ruptured disc joints, and three bellies, including the ones protruding from the sides. I have one blue and one green eye. I have a cat and a pair of paradise birds that keep arguing with each other when they are not in love. I have a crown made of twigs and bird bones. I have a cabinet of curiosities full of raw, dead hands of nature. I have a shelfful of diaries with different sizes and colors. I have all the time to fill those pages, and a phonebook full of dead people.
I do: Pick up and drop things. Fall off the side of the bed, and sometimes the couch. Strike my pinky toe to a table leg, if not the chair. Twirl my tongue into a clover. Roll blunts into five different shapes. Smoke clove cigarettes in the afternoons. Go to work in the morning and come home at night. Sleep. Park my car in my neighbor’s garage when I’m mad at him. Ask the right questions to the wrong people. Get up from bed every morning. Wear exclusively red to work. Climb the stairs to the roof of my office building during lunch breaks and look down. Dream letting go of my belongings, starting with my body.
I do not: let things actually go. Starting with you.
Yours truly,
S—
2. BUREAU INVENTORYMcSweeney's #65, Plundered issue
A stack of The New Yorker issues that a friend from Istanbul has brought over
Three back-issues of Poetry that I found in a public shelf on my neighboring street the other week
The wooden cutout of Joseph Beuys' Holzpostkarte
A battered paperback copy of William Golding's The Inheritors
Make Your Own Movie guidelines that I could have never found the chance to take a look
A thirtieth-year catalog of O1O publishing house, which is being run by our landlord
A wireless Sennheiser headphones that I received as a gift last Christmas
A table lamp that barely works
A lot of dust
3. BIOGRAPHYSarp Sozdinler splits his time between Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Normal School, Hobart, Maudlin House, Passages North, The Offing, and elsewhere. Some of his pieces have been anthologized and received a mention at literary events, including the Waasnode Short Fiction Prize judged by Jonathan Escoffery.