Self Factory
Listen to Özge reading this poem:
Escape and get lost in the forest behind the factory first, find a wild beast carrying your face. Let it teach you every beauty and deformity about being you, then come back to the factory, turn on the lathe with others, each carrying a small piece of you—an eye, a strand of hair, a red nail, a hurting word. As aurora rises, fall into a bath of tinsels to wash your arteries, wash your gaze, wash the electric in the cells of your brain. A night on the rack, and there you are, ready to stumble out into the world, brand new to decide: this time I will not betray myself.
Girl Factory
the radiant reflection of her eye in the jetblack horse’s eye a starving night behind with a sudden rain of fireflies under her feet—a snare trap fetch her from the wilderness put her in a grey concrete cube on a sterilised steel stretcher under a hundred halogen lights around her body—latex faces make her eyes gas-blue hair dipped in bright blonde tame her skin silky ice-white skinny in an opaque plastic bag in her chest—a missing wishbone take her out to the world unfurl the red ribbons watch her stumble around embraced by jealous clappings on her scapula—leaden wings
Özge Lena is an internationally published poet who appears in The London Magazine, The Madrid Review, Hunger Mountain Review, and in numerous magazines and anthologies across continents. She recently presented her poetic approach "Catapoetics: Poetry of the Catastrophe" at the International Conference on Poetry Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, following the publication of her catapoetry article in Modron Magazine, UK (2025). Her poetry has received Pushcart Prize, Editor's Choice Award, The Best Spiritual Literature Award, and Best of the Net nominations and was shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, The Plough Poetry Prize, Ralph Angel Poetry Prize, and the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize.