Author: Renee Newlon

I am a Turkish American writer and photographer. I work in short-form prose, poetic fragments, and photography. I don’t photograph the event; I photograph the moment after the event. A few things that stay with me: Plato’s Cave, Oberg’s Culture Shock, and Beethoven’s Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours. My greatest teacher was my college philosophy professor, Sister Jane Sullivan, who taught me how to think and how to see.

Brigid Does Not Come Alone

Place crocus bright beneath the flame,
where golden tongues remember spring.
Let rosemary and bay root low;
they keep the grounded center still.

Drape ivy where the shadows lean,
and fern where listening silence stays.
Around your light let green things climb,
like hope kept breathing through dark days.

If grain remains from autumn stored,
or bread still warm from hearth and hand,
lay each small offering at the base—
for Brigid does not come alone.

She comes with fire, but also bread,
with well-water and living breath;
so dress your altar like a field,
and set warm hands against cold death.

Bell Hooks, Bone Black

I bring my book to her and read aloud. Like Rilke, she tells me not to be afraid to look deeply into everything, not even pain. I can tell her—my friend, who loves me always—that I want to belong, that it hurts to live always on the outside. She tells me there are many ways to belong in this world, and that it is my work to discover where I belong.

At night, when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write: I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone-black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.

Peace is a Semicolon

The sun spills white as judgment
across the stone.

There, a man lies
stretched on the pavement,
another body given over
to the boulevard.

The marble burns.
But the poor learn early
to take fire
as one more thing endured.

Men pass.
Their polished shoes
speak first,
and never kindly.

No one bends.
No one kneels to ask
whether breath still labors
in that hollow chest.

Nearby, in the charity of shade,
a dog keeps watch.

He knows the arithmetic of streets:
the cruelty of noon,
the patience of hunger,
the brief mercy of shadow.

O brother of dust and gutter,
quiet witness at the curb,
you and this fallen man
belong to the same republic—

that wide country of the forgotten
whose only law
is endurance.

Star Under Cloth

And sometimes—
when ritual hush fell like snow
and the air thickened with older names,
when gestures turned like keys
in locks I could not see—
I felt each soul as a star kept under cloth,
each life a fire sworn to its orbit;
and I knew the terrible tenderness of it:
not all stars are kind,
yet all must burn true.

So you made a temple of me, O light—
not of marble,
but of measured hours and reined desire,
of mercy laid as mortar,
of truth squared to the tongue,
of love obedient to will.
And because you built, you exposed—
for temples gather dust as surely as cottages.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.
So I sweep, and let the lamp judge.

Deafening Silence

It comes without warning,
like snow deciding the forest has said enough.

No hush, no shhh—
only abrupt vacancy
where small sounds once rented rooms.

The clock, once ticking like nervous fingers,
now pauses between seconds,
unwilling to be first to violate the truce.

In this wide, white room without echo,
even memory moves softly,
careful not to wake the next thought.

Silence is not absence.
It is a different density—
the weight of everything
that was nearly spoken
pressing inward against the ribs.

Here, grief finally releases its breath
without excuse.
Here, joy learns
it does not require an audience.

Stay.
Let the hush complete its long sentence.
It has been composing it
since the first word learned how to sound.