Özge Lena
diorama of white
in this dream, i’m wearing a shroud
and there’s only one colour in the world; blinding
white. the air smells of extinguished
candles, the oxygen is chalky. i’m lying down
on the endless snow as the sky turns
into a diorama of the past for a nanosecond.
it’s made of a tiny girl of ice and glass,
thus fragile in the face of any colour. she’s of milk,
of soap, of soft feathers of a swan, of paper
that opens her vein, and of red that breaks the dream.
then of salt planted on the wound. of morphine.
Özge Lena is a worldwide published poet who appears in The London Magazine, Modron Magazine, The International Times, and elsewhere in various countries, including the UK, USA, Canada, Singapore, Spain, Iceland, Serbia, France, etc. Özge's poetry was nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize in 2021, then for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023 and for the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize in 2024. Her ecopoem "Undertaker" is forthcoming in the Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War Anthology of Scarlet Tanager Books in the USA. Also, her poem “Here is a New Heart For You” was showcased in the Barnes & Noble bookshop for National Poetry Month.