Full Sturgeon Moon

LELA TOLAJIAN

Under the light of August’s
Full Sturgeon Moon
I am told a great-aunt slept
in the unmarked killing fields
of a land that would become French- 
Mandate Syria, and then just Syria. 
Her clothes like a boy, her face
like a boy, a dead boy in her arms.
I am told we do not remember what 
his mother named him. The things 
we do to avoid the mind’s violence. 
Like envisioning the place
she once lived, which is no longer 
a place: a tongue bloated
with thirst, hanging
from an unfinished sentence.
All of us, in our bones, we
carry the women
who did not leave. Who were bred
to birth the nation state
of another man’s name. We sleep
to the rattling of those bones,
in the darkness. Our bodies
cover their stories like scum
atop a pool’s surface in Ourfa
or a covered hearth in Diyarbakir. 
And when we rise, the grains
at the bottom of our coffee cups 
begin to look like the face
of a boy carried by his sister,
made to look like a boy
who was already made
to forget his name, 

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LELA TOLAJIAN (she/her) is an Armenian-American writer, journalist, and the founder of the International Coalition Against Modern Slavery. She is currently a senior at Georgetown University.