The air today smelled so much like Philadelphia. Spring. Cut grass and blossoming trees, the city shivering free of winter, exalted with sun. I thought of my family. The long shadows of our backyard. The azaleas blinking, briefly, to life. The geraniums my nephew and grandfather planted, their hands working the hard Pennsylvania clay. One of them is like a glacial spring in May, a germinating torrent. The other is like a sunflower bracing for dusk, folding slowly closed. Meat smoke, and the ambrosia of old baseball leather. The deep rooted trees that rustle and sing.


Istanbul, of course, is not Philadelphia. But today, with such gilded light…

What is it, she asks. She’s been telling a story about why she no longer plays piano; it has to do with the oppressiveness of small towns.

Memory, I say. It has such a weight sometimes.

She peels up in bed, like a pistil aroused. Just your nerves firing. Electricity. Snaps her fingers. Like a light turning on or turning off. And desire, too. All of it electricity. And your heart. She rests a palm on my breast. A girl I once loved and lost told me about the systems of the heart. She was going to be a doctor. Now she is.

No, it’s more. Memory, that is. It’s a space, like that cistern in the city, the old reservoir with the tall columns and the fish.

She lights a cigarette, I open the window. The city slipstreams in: baroque traffic, classical music, little girls who hang out of windows and catcall kissing lovers on the street.

And how is your cistern? she asks, bending down and biting my ribs. Softly.

Full of trees and shadows.