Benjamin Morris

KANTARA, NORTH CYPRUS

From here we can see the land
already beginning to flee itself:
the bays on the north and east

sides of the river crouch at the ready,
each awaiting the peninsula's tip
where they will become holy

because our fictions tell them to.
Coming up, the mountain road
nearly lost us, tossing the car around

as a cat paws a tinkling plaything,
and now we are here, the top
of the audible world, the bottom

of our known selves. No wonder
you've asked me for a cigarette-
when you've climbed this far up,

there's nothing else to do.  No wonder,
either, that I've run out since last night,
when you wrapped your thighs

around my knee and rode it for the bone
it had to become, for this land, this
mountain, this holiness it had to disown.

Benjamin Morris is a native of Mississippi but now lives in Cambridge, England.