Sunday Sept. 2016

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This is the only poem I wrote while visiting Turkey in September of 2016. I wrote it on a Sunday. Then I stayed in Turkey, and I left on that Wednesday. At the airport in Konya I went through a security checkpoint at the main entrance, and later I went through another to enter the terminal. Security personnel asked me to take both cameras out of my bag and release the shutters, to which I complied. They then performed a test designed to detect explosive material on each of my rolls of film. I made it out of the country with no complications, except that I hadn’t realized I was to be served a complimentary meal on the flight, so I had already eaten.

When I had first arrived in Istanbul, the customs agent had said to me, in regard to my passport photo: “You’ve changed.”

Then I had said to him, “Yeah.”

Alex Lilburn is a writer and filmmaker from Bentonville, AR who spends some time working at Canyon Cinema down there in Bayview. His work revolves around the spark between materiality and psychic tension, like the day in science class when the teacher would light magnesium in front of everybody and it goes on like that, sparking, or rather burning, you know, transmuting, but then it fizzles and goes out just like the magnesium in science class, after a while.