Gonca Özmen was born in Burdur, Turkey, in 1982. She studied English Language and Literature at Istanbul University, receiving an MA in 2008 and a PhD in 2016. Her first poem was published in 1997 and in 1999 she received the Ali Rıza Ertan Poetry Prize. Her first collection Kuytumda (In My Nook, 2000) won the Orhon Murat Arıburnu Poetry Prize and in 2003 she received Istanbul University’s Berna Moran Poetry Prize.

Her second collection Belki Sessiz (Maybe Silent) appeared in 2008 and published in German, translated by Monika Carbe, in 2017. A selection of her poems in English, The Sea Within, translated by George Messo, ap- peared in 2011.
She is one of the editors of the literary magazine Çevrimdışı Istanbul and a member of the advisory board of Bursa Nilüfer International Poetry Festival and the magazine, Turkish Poetry Today, published annually by Red Hand Books, England. She is also a member of the Three Seas Writers’ and Translators’ Council (TSWTC) in Rhodes, Greece.

RUIN
Sebastian there’s nothing I can tell you about the snow of this mountain

Your every waking isn’t splinters, your every turn is not beyond you You’ve never given birth so how can you know
Being split down the middle not like a pomegranate or watermelon It’s not so easy to reach that spell

To gather your things and migrate to your own stomach To become a ruin

Sebastian in the past I had red animals
Howling at night from both of us for both of us to both of us If two of us love the same man will a rose grow from this Let’s take blue buses let’s take them and be cooler
Let’s listen to songs of pain and chew their fruit
My hanging in between
Would it be something my lover could see

Translated from Turkish by Zoë Skoulding and author