Sin Goat

You tell me you are the sin goat

of your family, this is what

you are destined to be. A blood

moon ripens over our heads.

We sip wine and each other’s tongue

on the edge of the terrace and watch

our city burning amid the sirens.

You tell me a sin goat is a mute one

to shoulder all the blame and guilt,

to carry to the edge of an abyss,

to drop itself down at once. The moon

turns into carmine, the colour of crushed

insects. We look up at the clouds

of smoke where the beast of future

roars before us in a dim, deep

tunnel, terrifying to enter.

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Özge Lena's poetry has appeared in many countries, including the USA, UK, Canada, Iceland, Singapore, Spain, Serbia, France, etc., in distinguished publications such as The London Magazine, Hunger Mountain, The International Times, Sky Island Journal, The Trumpeter, Cambridge Poetry, and The Madrid Review, along with many anthologies worldwide. Özge's work received nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and was 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" will be featured in the forthcoming Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War Anthology (Scarlet Tanager Books, US), and her poem "Here is a New Heart For You" was featured in the storefront of Barnes & Noble in Dublin, California, for National Poetry Month 2024.