So fast, so slow, so painful, so soft
Wait until they take their heads out of the vagina
Who wears what and which colors will be chosen, without forgetting
The past and glorious heritage, without carrying anthems
Connecting visual feasts with opiate wine
Being enchanted, loving so much, passionately in love with penis
Ancestry’s beloveds are inks from sovereigns
Who wrote this dewan who read on which feeling
and who were in private room with whom, who teased
whose body and which fatwa was written for us
do you have a prayer in mind read it if you do but first
repent
Savages shahs elephants your dongless boys came here
Our mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts went through a bloody cycle
They made them go through days
With machetes, knives, swords and gave a son’s name to government
Now we memorize his name and soul soberly
We praise him and his family, play janissary music on the latest speakers
Forth and back, right and left
We consign our chastity to boy’s co-dongers to protect.
Who wrote this lust-epistle who copied in old writing and handed out
To the women in our neighborhood, independency and unorthodoxy
We were one of you we wanted it too, by covering our triangles with hair
Shut up, repent
Your burnt, whiter than white, droopy, stony breasts
To breastfeed very desirous, greedy, virtuous children
To be grasped or only
To be cut for punishment or to be hung on ceilings from two nipples
These nipples, huge, brown or pink
Must be hidden, must not be seen, many clothes are not enough
Breasts must be restrained!
Who found this cloth, drooped from the back, underwired bras
let it not droop, they lose their appetites if it droops, not
corset, not that cruel any more, they let us
breathe, underpinned, creating the effect of operation,
sateen lace transparent silk decreasing two sizes
The one who hangs us,
the mammals, hangs the body fastening on earth
from the armpits
Putting on velvet bonds to another imprisonment
Oh dear girl do not let so much men touch your breasts
They will droop and nobody will like them
Oh dear girl let’s put round cups on them
So that they will be lumpy that’s nicer
Oh dear girl do not wear that blouse, its collar is open
You’ve just bleed and you’ve just understood your country’s soil
From which martyrs spring
You smelled, when reading poem on October twenty ninth
I will wrap your breasts with cotton clothes
Who revolted first, that he is our prophet they will not
allow, hadith sunna fard
We didn’t enter their worlds blended with tales
therefore
We listened to the words of our grandmothers
who wrote articles against articles claiming that
The man stripped to the waist is not equal
to the woman stripped to the waist
We may not know which wave, we started this wave
From an edge of earth that was blessed to his grandchild
Ruled and expanded by Ottoman.
We felt proud of hiding breasts while breastfeeding
We liked to display them under a piece of cloth
We opened it more
And we bounced them up, we rode bicycles, we played ball
We collected a mountain, started from the ones who have loosed tires
And we climbed the steps one by one upon
Most expensive laced black bras that can steal men’s hearts
Thick back, transparent back, thin strapped strapless.
Who lighted that fire and threw it
around our bra mountain, none of us saw
We burned them all
Then with nude droopy big small rounded wide hard soft
Breasts
Wrote our own history
Artificial or natural
Whoever thinks she’s a woman with that breast
We wrote
We made the dance that rose clouds of dust
Over ashes
We made
So happy so free many people.
Translation: Gözde Zülal Solak
Photography: History Channel