About the Book
The Yellow of August is Lara Abuali's second book of poetry, comprising forty-six poems on love.
Love is as inevitable as breathing, and for the teenage author it was important to learn how to love deliberately (think strokes of paint, rather than uncontrollable splashes). More than anything, this collection is a story. To show her progress, Lara put all her poems in chronological order to show an arc in every idea and every theme - the reader can follow the growth to be found in grief, in health, in temperature, and, yes, in love.
Lara wrote all these poems in the summer of 2021. That August, her most meaningful month, she settled into a rhythm of writing in the languid heat, adapting herself to accommodate it.
Lara hopes that this collection will bring the readers back to the whirlpool of feelings they might have felt at fifteen.
--------------------------------------------- POEMS FROM The Yellow of August:
THE GIVING I WANTED
maybe what I yearn for is heartbreak ...
saying goodbye, but never to you, and
always listening. always watching you
in the shadows, in the dappled sun of
a lemon grove. the kind of bitterness
where we never really said
I don't want toor
I can't do this. but we couldn't, and
you knew.
the mourning. that ache, like
skin stretched over a drum too tightly,
little holes forming, the sound hollow and weak.
the sleeplessness. lying wide awake,
when it's not just the love but the want that remains.
usually, the want is the last to go -
I don't care about you but still I need
to hold you, to give to you, and lastly to get from you.
what I wanted all along, your giving, never came,
and the thing that kept me from stepping over your body
was that. the giving I wanted.
maybe that is what I am nostalgic for ...
some drum thumped in my stomach, a pain
I wanted to take Ibuprofen for.
how I craved the acidity of lemons,
sucking the juice from a split fruit
and wincing half with sourness.
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ISTANBUL
When planning to sleep, the dream from the night before always sets the tone.
Last week I dreamed of Athens. This week I am dreaming of airports and transit and luggage and hotels. Something is shifting, something is changing.
My brother is always fifteen in my dreams. He turned twenty last month, it doesn't matter.
I've grown to hate sleep. I've grown to hate my dreams, and I have them every night, these useless, anxious visions of the places I frequent.
Last November,
I was stuck in Istanbul with no money and no food for twelve hours. It was a tiny hiccup in a life of comfort but it's haunted me ever since- those menacing curved couches, the designer ads and the smell of light blue perfume.
I am so tired of leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back.
I still wish I had a home. I wish I had a car and a licence.
I could drive onto a cargo ship, be at my birthplace in no time.
I could make that ship my Istanbul.
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