Semiquincentennial updates
It’s the USA’s 250th birthday, and because it’s been a minute since I updated my Substack, I thought I’d send out some updates on what I’ve been up to.
Happy Fourth of July!
I stopped updating this Substack regularly last year; I was still grieving Ruby when I had a pretty bad back injury that required an MRI and laid me out for a while. Spent summer 2025 recovering and sitting down to write for long stretch just wasn’t in the cards.
Then Dilara and I found out we were expecting. Fast-forward to April 2026 and we welcomed a new addition to our family:
Elvis Ozan Boruszak
He’s 10 weeks old and still discovering the world. He has the sweetest little smile, he’s learning to laugh, and figuring out how to use his hands. I can already tell that he’s going to be a smartass, like his father, and I can’t wait. I love this little guy.
A couple of brief notes on his name:
Elvis was Dilara’s suggestion originally, and it was just perfect. He’s not named after Elvis Presley, although there are a lot of cute overlaps. I’m from Las Vegas originally, My “first dance” with Dilara was to “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” I’ve got a Bowie lightning bolt tattoo; Bowie shares a birthday with Presley and modeled the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt on Elvis’s TCB lightning bolt. But what really drew me to the name “Elvis” was thinking of it as a name for the future. Elvis Presley died 50 years ago and the kids don’t know who he is anymore. It’s up for grabs again, and it’s a name he can make his own during his life.
His middle name, pronounced “Oh-zahn,” is the Turkish word for “poet.” Poetry is one of things that brought Dilara and I together, and I love that he’s able to have a name in the native language of his immigrant grandparents. Plus, Turkish poetry is sung and ozan also has the sense of “bard” – making “Elvis Ozan” an especially musical name.
His first and middle names, literally translated to English, mean “All wise poet.”
Website updates
I’ve been fiddling with ouroboruszak.com over the past few weeks to bring it up to date. One of my problems for a while has been that I don’t like working in any single platform. I’ll write on my Substack, or post short updates on Bluesky, or write movie reviews on Letterboxd.
I’m trying to bring all of these efforts together in a single location. The updated homepage uses Astro to build from a public GitHub repository and deploy using Cloudflare pages. I’ve added Substack and Letterboxd RSS feeds, and I’m going to keep experimenting with other ways to make digital content and share it through ouroboruszak.com.
Poetry updates
To close out this update, I wanted to share a poem I’m working on. The current piece is titled “Semiquincentennial Rhapsody” – I was hoping to have it ready for today, but surprise surprise, taking care of an infant and writing on a deadline aren’t the most compatible efforts.
The plan is for this poem to be 13 stanzas, each with 13 lines. Thirteen is for the original number of states, and then there’s a little formal play going on…
A “sonnet crown” is a sequence of 14 poems, each consisting of 14 lines. The last line of one sonnet repeats as the first line of the next sonnet, and at the end they produce a 15th sonnet consisting of these repeating lines. 13 lines intentionally refuses this connective tissue, creating a “broken crown” for the 250th anniversary of the United States and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Hence the “rhapsody”: distinct pieces stitched together without connective tissue.
Semiquincentennial Rhapsody
1
once upon a time some truths were self-evident. now a dream
deferred detonated and we remain as debris among the rubble.
six months frozen in valley forge to three days on cemetery hillin pennsylvania where minnesota held the line. ground into snowand dirt whole beaches riddled with lifeless clumps coagulatedfrom sacrifice. rising ocean tides heaved reached out to shapeeroding fossils before discovery so that we reassembled historyinto creatures born from imagined forms without a lick of concernfor fidelity in those ideals of unity equality life liberty the pursuitguaranteed by the people’s consent. is one-half of five hundreda prophecy or a threat. as blood spills over oil in distant gulfs stillin this year two thousand twenty-six anno domini they murderedgood and pretti. sanguineous ice flows but minnesota held the line.*
president Ubu skulks alone through his palace halls. enter merdre-lagohis xanadu where weak supplicants kneel into his foul trenchantstenches where gold warms pockets in lieu of hearts. rich bozosproffer odes while muskrats pass trinkets. never mind behind the curtain.so what if he buried his first wife at his golf club behind the third teethat way he can visit each day piss on her grave and call it a tax break.bruised hands swelling ankles a drooping sneer belie his persistent hungerfor self-glorification. demolish the east wing for a great grand ballroomplaced upon top-of-the-line bunkers absolutely beautiful. in love withonly his own name he slaps it on buildings adds his portrait to passportseven renames tax forms after almighty Ubu. playing king acting withoutshame he thrives in washington politics as a blue-ribbon pig rolling in shita narcissus gazing at his reflecting pool infatuated with its surface scum.