Wounds: a gateway carved into my flesh, my roots, my patrída’s bones.

“Kılıç artıkları!” they sneer.

“Leftovers of the sword”: roots remaining in an earth blood-watered.

Soumelá grieves for recollective silence; if you chip off a piece, it tastes of antídoron and defiled marrow.

When astrocytes scar it’s gliosis; when the mind scars it’s heartache.

«Εγώ Ποντιόπουλ’ είμαι· ματώνω κι ματούμαι.»

(Eghó Pontiópoul’ íme; matóno ki matoúme.)

“Pontian, I am; bleed I and bleed we.”

The gateway into my flesh still parts where veins twist like roots in cyanotic syncope—so oft-traversed its scarred agape to bare my patrída’s bones: antídoron for the desert-walkers.

Cut-up Borçxa (ბორჩხა) heals to Borçka (…)

Our mountains of karst lapped by the black seas still seep a gunky red—unwashable—like the last Caspian tiger comforting his own loneliness.

Şeçeri desert sand crunches beneath my bleeding feet as I trail my father’s unspooled brains back home.

Ottoman leftovers behind a yaşmak—false skin stretched over bone-baring wounds.

My wounds: a gateway; a bottomless cavern I walk through before day breaks and when night falls, tracing

its tattered ridges like scars.

My tattered ridges.

My scars.

Rough as mountains of karst, as black seas, as recollective silence.