This marvelous story begins with instructions that feel more like a kind of ritual; we soon see how grief and vengeance, when held close for so long, can shape our actions until they become a way of life—or until they do us in. The acute tension of this story focuses on the day-to-day operations of a neighborhood restaurant. Through careful descriptive attention and thoughtful character work in this realm, so much more is revealed and understood about the past, with devastating consequences: long held secrets, complicated betrayals, the weight of festering guilt. I admired how the setting and the descriptions of physical work so deeply shape the characters; they feel fully realized and alive. I was also transfixed by how expertly the tension and conflict are sustained throughout the story—all the way until its breathtaking end—in a way that felt effortless, inevitable, and masterful. — Guest Judge Jennine Capó Crucet
Push the ash from the night before around until you have something of a basin in the middle. Then drop bits of charcoal on the lip of this crater. Tear up a piece of cardboard, drop the strips into the center. A nice little nest forms. Hold a lit match to a curled piece of paper and, as it catches, lay long sticks of charcoal over the top of the flames. Imprison the fire.
It takes about four minutes for the charcoal to really get going, which is just enough time for a glass of rakı. I pour two fingers of the clear anise liquor in my tall, thin glass. Then the water. If you add it slowly, tendrils of what looks like smoke extend into the clear liquid until eventually the whole thing is translucent white. Two ice cubes on top. Lion’s milk. Only the first sip burns.
I fan the charcoal. Heat rises, blurring my view of the twelve tables. A small restaurant, sure, but full most nights—regulars taking the stools on the other side of the grill, the tables packed. People like watching me cook, asking what I marinate the şiş kebab in, or why I wait until the last moment to salt the chicken.
But this is my favorite time, just me tending the fire in the late-afternoon light as it comes through the front windows. Outside, people pass up and down our narrow, cobblestone street. Here comes Bora up the three steps to the door, in his black vest and pants, his white shirt open two buttons. The cowbells on the door clang.
“Ahmet,” he says, pointing to the rakı. “You’ve started without me.”
“I’m just sipping. I don’t throw it back like you do.”
He takes the bottle, pours himself three fingers, and goes into the kitchen to get some ice. The coals are ready. I spread them out, a bead of sweat sizzling as it drops on one. The old ashes are critical now—you coat the new coals so they won’t burn too hot and quick.
The rattle of the cart with the meat and vegetables on it announces Bora’s return. He smacks the cart into one end of my grill station, blocking me in. “To your honor,” he says, but he brings his glass right to his lips and downs it in one gulp, not bothering to tap his glass to mine.
The cowbells clang. In a quick move, I take our two drinks from the top shelf of the cart to a lower one, out of sight. In the space between the hood and the grill, I can only see Bora’s torso as he steps forward to greet a slender man. They speak—I can’t hear much. The guest’s speech is halting.
Bora steps around the hood. “Ahmet Usta, there’s a visitor here to see you. A foreigner.”
Sometimes tourists wander down from the hotels on the hill around the palace and Blue Mosque, looking for authenticity in our neighborhood packed against the crumbling wall of the old city.
“What did he order?” It’s annoying Bora has made me ask.
“He’s not here to eat.” Bora moves over and gestures to the guest to come closer.
A blond man steps into view. I stand. He’s young, but he already has lines on either side of his mouth. I feel I’ve seen him before.
“Usta,” the man says, “I want learning.” His Turkish accent is good, even if the grammar is off.
“What he means,” Bora clarifies, “is he wants to study how to cook with you. So he can open an ocakbaşı just like this in his home country. He will, of course, pay for the pleasure.”
I stand. The foreigner’s eyes are naïve but also old. He offers me his hand over the cart. When I go to shake it, he instead bends and kisses the back of my palm, then holds it to his forehead out of respect.
“Please, Usta,” he says, refusing to release me. “I will do all the necessary.” We stand off-balance. His hand trembles.
“Go to the furniture store up the street,” I tell him. “Ask for Murat Bey. Explain that Ahmet Usta sent you for a stool.”
“Stool?”
“Tabure,” I repeat, leaning down to pat mine.
He bows. I wonder if he’s going to cry. “Thank you, Usta, thank you.” He practically runs out the door, muttering tabure, tabure.
Bora grins, showing the gap in his top teeth from the bar fight last month.
“Ahmet, this might be fortune smiling on you. Ocakbaşı lessons for foreigners.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I skewer a couple of eggplants.
“No, really. And that was smart, leaving him on thorns while you thought it over. Now he’ll pay twice as much.”
I sit and take a drink of rakı.
“No, Bora, he won’t. I’m not going to charge him.”
I don’t have to look up to know Bora is glaring at me. He huffs.
“Don’t be stupid, Ahmet.”
“Why should he pay? I’ll teach him and he’ll work.”
Bora strides into the kitchen.
When I’ve finished peeling the burnt skin off the roasted eggplant, I sense the foreigner standing there, stool in hand.
“Wheel the cart back so you can come and sit next to me behind the grill here. Tonight, you watch. Tomorrow you’ll work. Don’t forget what you see.”
* * *
The grill is full—long green peppers on the right, kebab in the middle, lamb and chicken on the left—when in my peripheral vision I see Bora beckon the foreigner into the kitchen.
How many years have we worked together, Bora? You’re always looking for an angle, I’m always rounding off the edges.
When I’ve flipped all the meat and taken the peppers off, I go to the kitchen door. Pushing it open a crack, I see Bora standing in front of the sink, counting bills as the foreigner watches.
“Yes,” Bora is saying, “it’s not right for an Usta to take the money himself. But don’t worry, he appreciates it.”
Bora has just put the money in his pocket when I walk in.
“Bora,” I say as I extend my hand. “Don’t act so formal, you can give me the money now.”
Is it possible Bora’s eyes actually flash red or is it just a trick of the fluorescent light? He takes the cash out and looks at it. Then he gives it to me. I fold the bills in half and stuff them in the foreigner’s shirt pocket.
“Let this stay with you. You’ll work hard enough to earn this and more.”
He protests but I keep my hand on the pocket so he can’t pull the money back out. “Not another word. I’m the Usta.”
* * *
The rush is over by ten. A young man and woman are finishing up their künefe. Murat, the owner of the furniture store, sits across the dying embers from me, the coffee cup dwarfed by the size of his hand. He listens to the foreigner ask me questions on how many minutes this and that cooks. Murat listening doesn’t bother me—he wouldn’t give away my recipes if you held a paring knife to his eye.
The foreigner and I come out from behind the grill and join Bora and Murat at the table by the window. I’ve plated seven skewers of lamb şiş, grilled tomatoes and peppers, and a little Albanian-style liver to soak up the rakı. The foreigner won’t need it, sipping his. But Bora and I are well past tipsy. Bora slams his glass down, cursing under his breath.
“Bora Bey,” I protest. No response. So I turn it into a request. “Can you bring the pilav and gavur dağ?”
Pushing himself up from the counter, Bora heads back to the kitchen. Murat raises his eyebrows. The foreigner looks miserably into his rakı. He doesn’t know that Bora and I have been at one another’s throats for years and it has nothing to do with him.
Murat asks, “How long have you been here in Istanbul?”
“It is a year.”
“Shouldn’t your Turkish be better?”
The foreigner’s cheeks turn almost as red as the coals.
I pat Murat on the back. “Don’t give our new friend a hard time—”
Bora bursts through the kitchen door, thumping the plates of rice and salad on the table.
“I not take offense,” the foreigner assures Murat.
“Offense?” Bora snorts, turning to yell right in my face. “Of course he’s not offended—he comes in ready to pay, and you… You want to give away the little you have, paying for this infidel’s meat and rakı—”
“Enough!” I’m on my feet, gripping his shoulders. “Bora Bey, sit down and apologize. Or God as my witness, you won’t have a job.”
“Apologize!” He breaks my grip. Stares hard into my eyes. Then he sneers and turns to the foreigner. “I am sorry, but not to you. I’m sorry fate has bound me to this man. He’s cursed—look out the back door, you’ll see the burned-out remains of what used to be Ahmet Usta’s life.”
The foreigner raises his hands as if in surrender. “I didn’t mean—”
“Bora, you’re drunk,” Murat says, hitting the table with the flat of his hand. “Sit and eat. Don’t dig up the past.”
“But Ahmet Usta doesn’t have to dig,” Bora fires back. “He lives the past. Sets that fire again each day! Watch him, foreigner—he wants to die but he’ll slowly kill you instead.”
He kicks over his chair and walks out.
* * *
“Usta, the meat. They come.”
The foreigner is shaking me awake. It’s past midnight. There’s a pile of butcher-paper packages on the cart.
“Help me up,” I ask him.
Once I’m standing, I see he’s cleared the tables and mopped. Bless him.
I pat him on the shoulder. “Time to prep for tomorrow.”
He pushes the cart through the swinging door into the kitchen—I catch it before it bounces back, then make my way to the sink. Washing my face with cold water helps. I put five heaping tablespoons of coffee in the cezve—four for me and one for him.
I put the cart in the middle of the room, between the counter and fridge.
“First, the şiş kebab.”
While he puts everything but the lamb chunks in the fridge, I take a couple of bills from my pants pocket. The butcher’s son doesn’t leave without his father’s money.
“Here.” I put a twenty-million-lira bill on the cart.
From under the counter, I take three bunches of garlic. Next, the chopping block and knife. I go to put it all in front of him, but the money is still there.
“Pick that up! You have to dice the garlic.”
“Usta, I want to pay. Bora is right.”
“Pick. That. Up.”
He pockets the bills. “Bora’s right. And Bora’s wrong.” I pour the coffee in two mugs.
He looks at me, a mix of pity and frustration in his furrowed brow. He’s taken care of a drunk before.
I start talking as he dices the garlic, telling him how I inherited the restaurant at nineteen following my father’s early death. Out the back door was an herb and tomato garden and then our house, built right into the wall of the old city, a view from the top floor over the coastal highway and the Marmara Sea. Not large—one room per floor—but a little air to breathe and the green scent of the giant walnut tree in the garden. A gift in a neighborhood where the butcher shop stinks of the tannery next door.
My father had problems keeping waiters, and I inherited those as well. Until an old friend said he’d be there for life if I made him a partner. Bora.
A lot to ask. But I loved his sister. I made coffee for the two of them every afternoon, just to hear her laugh. Not a pretty laugh—God, she laughed like a goat. You couldn’t help but laugh with her.
“Her name?”
The foreigner’s voice booms in the narrow space.
“Dilek. And she really was my greatest wish.”
I pull four cartons of milk from the fridge and empty them in a couple of giant metal bowls, scraping the chopped garlic in. Time to unwrap the cubed lamb.
“Get the skewers from the drying rack,” I point next to the sink, “and the fork with the middle tines missing.”
He gives me that lost look again. I hold up four fingers, then bend the two middle ones down slowly.
He finds it.
“Put holes in your şiş before you soak it. That way it’ll soften up but won’t fall apart as it cooks.”
The foreigner watches me shove the meat on and then slide it back off with the weird fork, dropping the cubes into the garlic and milk.
“Careful,” I warn him, “these square skewers are better than the round ones but the edges will slice your hands.” I show him the scars on one palm.
I skewer and unskewer in silence. This man knows plenty about me but I know nothing of him.
“What’s your name?”
He’s surprised, like he’s momentarily forgotten. “Hardy.”
“Hardy Bey. What’s it mean?”
He thinks a moment, then one side of his mouth twitches in a quick smile. “Cesur.”
“Courage, indeed. There’s an old folk song: Courage is a label—false or forced.”
He frowns, struggling to understand.
“Ah!” I’ve gone and sliced my hand on the skewer’s edge.
A shallow cut, but he has to take over. By the time the bleeding stops, he’s finished.
“Wash all the tomatoes behind you and chop them,” I say as I put the bowl of meat soaking in milk in the fridge. “Don’t forget, good gavur dağ has tomato pieces no bigger than your sparrow fingernail.”
Again that frown. I point to the nail on my pinky. He brightens and nods. As he chops, I see he knows what he’s doing.
“Soak the tomatoes in olive oil and sour pomegranate syrup overnight. My wife taught me that.”
She said men didn’t know how to handle subtlety. And she was right. On the day Bora was bringing me the contract for us to become partners, Dilek rushed into the kitchen. She wasn’t laughing. She told me Bora couldn’t be trusted. I felt the pain in her eyes in my own body—what it must have cost her to speak those words against her own flesh and blood.
When Bora came into the restaurant, I told him I couldn’t do it. He lost himself, picked up a chair and hit me with it. I went down on my hands and knees. He put the chair down. I shot up and punched him in the jaw. He swung and connected with my gut. I fell onto the floor, gasping. Bora slowly raised the chair again.
The cowbells jangled—Murat rushed in and held Bora. “Dur!” Murat’s voice boomed and Bora did stop, caught in Murat’s iron grip. I coughed. Murat tossed Bora into a chair and pointed for me to get in the one across the table. He held one of each of our wrists in his giant hands. Eventually, the three of us were breathing normally.
“Bora, you’ve asked for too much,” Murat began. “But Ahmet, you agreed.” Thus it went, back and forth. In the end I had to buy Bora and his wife Zeynep the apartment above Murat Bey’s store. I was impressed with how devious Dilek had been—her own brother would never suspect she’d put Murat up to a solution that cost me and for which Murat stood to make a pretty kuruş.
A month later, she and I were married.
“That’s enough for tonight,” I say. The foreigner puts the tomatoes in the fridge.
* * *
The next day, Bora doesn’t show up for work. He wants me to go to his house, clawing the ground, begging him to return. But he also knows I won’t do this.
I ask the foreigner to wait tables for a couple of days. He’s not bad but not particularly good, either. And yet, people like his odd Turkish and forgive him his mistakes.
After a week, I stomp on my pride and go to the apartment above Murat’s shop. Bora’s not there.
“I have to speak with him,” I tell Zeynep, who stands in the doorway in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, smoking.
“About what?” Leaning against the door frame like she doesn’t know.
“About coming back to work.”
“I haven’t seen him for days.”
She looks at her painted nails. It’s not good that he hasn’t been home. Worse that she’s telling me.
“In fact, Usta,” she says, not looking away from her fingers, “I was going to come to you and ask for an advance.”
“An advance on what?”
“On Bora’s money, of course.”
“What money? He quit.”
She smiles and touches my arm. “Come on, Usta, you two just had a spat.”
“I’ll pay him if he works.”
She oofs and complains about the electric bill. Their fourteen-year-old son, Ali, comes around the corner of the hall and stands behind her, his face full of worry. I curse myself for speaking so openly in front of the child. Then an idea pops into my head.
“Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll give you Bora’s salary if Ali works for me five nights a week. Wednesday to Sunday, after school to ten. Starting tomorrow.”
Ali’s eyes grow as full as a fortune teller’s stone. But his mother readily agrees. I give her twenty million lira.
“Usta, do you have the new currency? You know these old bills are only good for a couple more months.”
* * *
November slips into December. Hardy is outside the restaurant every afternoon when I open the door. Then Ali comes and I give him a plate of şiş kebab. He does his homework as he eats. You wouldn’t think such a spindly kid could pack so much away, but he always finishes a double portion.
Then he and Hardy set the tables and wait on customers. It helps that the place is small so when Ali forgets to write extra onions or Hardy doesn’t understand rare, I hear and can easily make the adjustments. Then Ali is standing on the other side of the cart and I see it’s already 10pm.
One night after Ali has left and we’re in the kitchen, prepping the şiş and gavur dağ, Hardy says, “That young man is good for you, Usta.” He’s looking at my glass of rakı. I realize it’s the first I’ve poured.
I tell the foreigner how I never got drunk before I had a child. In fact, I was drinking tea the night I first heard my baby’s cry. Dilek’s mother came into the kitchen and grabbed me, hauling me across the garden and into our house. I could barely walk I was so afraid. Then she gave me the baby to hold, and I felt my little Erdem wrapped in a blanket, fragile and wriggling, like my mother-in-law had handed me my own beating heart. Now I knew terror.
The neighborhood where I’d grown up, where I knew the family behind every door, turned squalid in an instant, full of disease, the weight of history crushing us from above, trapped between the coastal highway and the walls of the old city. The missing manhole cover on the corner of Barn Door Road, the packs of feral dogs hunting rats at night, candy sold on the street for the holidays made from melted plastic, exploding natural-gas canisters, lead paint, earthquakes…
From time to time I hear a man say if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for his children. It’s all I can do not to punch him in the face.
And yet, despite my fears, somehow little Erdem grew. God knows he ate enough kebab. And bananas—when they first came to Turkey, bananas were three or even four times the price of meat. What can you do? The kid loves bananas, you buy bananas. Better than cola. Better than rakı.
I’d started drinking one glass a night with a single cigarette, to help me fall asleep.
Then my little Erdem came home with his report card at the end of first grade. All excellent. Not just his classes but behavior, hygiene, respect.
That was one of the first Fridays in June and the restaurant was full—rows of tables in the street. Erdem was showing everyone that report card. Bora said he was smart like his old man, but I knew Erdem was slated for better. He would get out of this wretched neighborhood. I’d clink my glass with whoever was near and I’d think, “How happy I am my son’s not going to be here, clinking glasses with your children in twenty years.”
I go quiet. Hardy has finished the tomatoes and cleaned the counter. I gesture for him to come with me to the back door. I have to hit it with my shoulder to get it open.
“That charred shell was our three-story home.” We walk through the weeds. “And this stump was the walnut tree—went higher even than the house.”
Now Hardy’s shaking his head. As if he could will it not to happen. He can’t. God knows I’ve tried.
The night Erdem was showing off his report card, he ran up to me. “Baba, can I sleep over at Ali’s?” Dilek went with him, her and Zeynep’s chatter like a couple of schoolgirls. Bora was delighted and poured me another lion’s milk and another, until I was as wet as a wick. How was I to know Erdem couldn’t sleep at his cousin’s house and Dilek had brought him home?
At some point, the whole neighborhood saw the fire. Bora ran into our back garden. Dilek screamed to him from the top floor balcony. She had Erdem in her hands, and threw him, burning, down to Bora. The roof collapsed just as he caught the boy. They got Erdem to the hospital and my poor son managed to live for all of two hours while I was curled up on the floor of the pantry, asleep.
The firefighters said any number of things could have started it on such a dry June night—a tea kettle left on the stove, an electric short in the wall, even just the burning end of a cigarette in the garden.
* * *
One Wednesday at 10pm, Ali says, “Uncle Ahmet, my father wanted me to tell you he’s coming to see you later.”
“Oh? Did he say what time?” I keep my expression flat.
“When you’re closing, I think.” Ali’s little brow is furrowed.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be good to see my old friend again—I’ll make some Albanian-style liver, his favorite.” This seems to calm Ali, but does little for the headache building behind my eyes.
After the restaurant’s empty, I fix a plate of şiş for the foreigner and put on two servings of liver. Hardy gives me a questioning look.
“Bora’s coming.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.” I hand him his dinner. “Take this into the kitchen and stay there.”
He looks at me with those simultaneously old and naïve eyes of his.
“As you wish, Usta.”
I sit and grill and think about Bora. I owe it to him to take him back, and I will. But then I’ll lose Ali, and the foreigner, too, sooner or later. And what will I gain? But that’s the way Bora would look at it, isn’t it?
Here he is, opening the door. But what Bora is this? A suit, collar open, black leather briefcase.
“Good evening, Ahmet Usta.”
“Welcome, Bora Bey.” We kiss each other’s cheeks in greeting and then he pats my back. His breath smells of whiskey.
“I’ve got liver cooking. Won’t you join me?” I pull out a chair at one of the tables.
“How could I refuse?” He smiles, a fake tooth in the gap. I open a new bottle of rakı.
“I’ll bring us some ice,” I say as he sits.
In the kitchen, the foreigner’s struggling to read the newspaper, a cup of coffee in his hand. There’s a cutting board next to the coffee saucer, butcher knife on it. I get the ice.
Bora and I eat and talk about the air and water. Our football team, Beşiktaş, is in fifth place and likely to drop lower, the mayor’s talking of rebuilding the old city walls, Ali’s got to get his grades up…
“Health to your hands, Usta, that was excellent,” Bora says. “Why don’t I make the coffee?” He puts his hands on the table to rise.
I grab his arm. “Bora, forget the coffee. Tell me what’s going on.” I gesture to the suit.
Another smile. “Always direct. I respect that about you, Ahmet. So, I’ll be direct as well. I’ve come to offer you this.”
He puts the briefcase on the table facing away from the front windows and slowly opens it. It’s filled with money. Stuffed.
“Ahmet, I want to buy this place and the land behind it. And I’m offering you double what it’s worth.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“It’s my life savings.”
I remember Bora’s wife hanging on their flimsy front door three weeks ago.
“What savings?”
“My father left me a little something and I just let it sit in the bank. Interest!” He shrugs. “No one’s ever known anything about it.”
I take in his suit, the pack of American cigarettes on the table and the silver lighter next to them. He closes the briefcase and pushes it towards me.
“Bora,” I look him in the eye, “let’s go tonight and give this cash back. We can work something out for what you’ve already spent.”
The mask slips a moment and the red anger flashes. Then again that smile as he points toward the windows. “Don’t you want out of this trash pit, Ahmet? For God’s sake, you’ve been sleeping on a roll-up mattress in the kitchen the last three years because you can’t even rebuild your house. Take this and move to the Asian side and I promise I’ll be right behind you. We’ll be neighbors again somewhere like Moda, with trees and clean streets—somewhere far from here.”
How I prayed for just such salvation when my son was alive. A briefcase full of cash, like in a movie.
“Bora, I’m not going anywhere. Whenever you want, you have a place here, but I can’t sell.” I stand and walk back to the kitchen. I hear Bora swear, followed by the cow bell as the door slams.
* * *
Four nights later around 1am, Hardy’s prepping the şiş in the back and I’m mopping between the tables when I see Bora through the window, a second before he swings the door open. He’s in the same suit but it’s ripped, pants caked with mud, the leather torn off one side of the briefcase.
“No lights,” he cries, hitting the switch on the wall. I find myself in the glow of the streetlamp as he cowers in shadow.
“You’ve got to save me,” he hisses. “They’re after me.”
“Just give the money back.”
“I can’t. I took money from one loan shark for the suit and everything, then from another to pay you, and I used my house as collateral for both. When you said you wouldn’t sell, I tried to double the money at cards. Now I’ve lost it all. They’re going to kill me.”
“What was your plan if I’d sold you the restaurant?”
“There’s a man, up the hill, who owns a couple of tourist hotels. He wants to open something down here for the sea view. But there’s only two streets with views. You can’t believe the money he offered—I would have made five times what this lousy place is worth.”
I wish the lights were still on and Hardy was in here mopping, and Bora had never come through my door. But he has. I move towards him.
“Give me whatever money is left and tell me where these moneylenders are,” I say. “I’ll speak with them.”
“I don’t have any of it! And they won’t deal with you—I barely escaped. They want to gut me. Our only chance is if we sell.”
I grab his shoulders and shake. “This is not yours to sell!”
He swings the briefcase up and the corner hits my chin, knocking me off balance and into the hood. Bora throws himself against me and we fall to the floor in front of the grill, skewers clattering around us. He grabs one and aims it at my chest—I block his arm but feel the end pierce my shoulder. Then he’s got his face right on top of mine.
“Your damned house was supposed to be empty when I set it on fire.” He’s staring right through me into the past. “It went up so fast, I thought it was God telling me I’d done the right thing.”
He sucks in air. Is it sweat or tears dripping on my face?
“You thought that house was your little island in our crap neighborhood. How could I have known they were inside? You, you should have died for not making me a partner!”
Suddenly Bora’s arm is being pulled back. Hardy is struggling with him. I feel the skewer tip pull out of my shoulder. I grab it and shake—the square edges cut Bora’s hand. He cries out. I flip it around and thrust.
* * *
The moneylenders blame one another for Bora’s disappearance. Murat whispers this to me one night as he sits at the counter. Then he complains about the rising price of leather as Ali comes and clears his plate.
“Murat Bey, it’s getting late,” I say. “Can you walk Ali home?”
The boy makes a face—he wants to stay up. Murat puts one of his giant hands on Ali’s shoulder. “Come young man, let us leave before Ahmet asks us to wash the dishes.”
I’ve told Zeynep I’ll pay her and Ali’s bills, but how will I tell Bora’s son when he gets older?
From time to time, I wonder about Hardy. He was silent as we dug the hole in the backyard. Was he in shock? Or was that his way of showing respect, walking away at dawn never to return?
Hardy Griffin’s writing has appeared in Aesthetica Magazine, New Flash Fiction, Fresh.ink, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and others. He wrote the chapter on Voice for Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury), contributed to Itasca Books’s 2024 Thriving Anthology as well as Red Noise Collective’s 2023 Anthology, and his translations can be found in Words Without Borders, Lunch Ticket, and The Istanbul Biennial. He is an editor for the internationally-focused online journal Cable Street and has an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Boğaziçi University.