by Hala Alyan
Either I’m Coming Back or I’m Not
Eyes for snow. The longest day of winter wolfs the birds. Your love is a love of hoofprints. The birds with their missing alphabet.
Sometimes.
I am everyday white. I jerk off to a not-wrecked Elizabeth Taylor. In the grocery store I buy the expensive oranges because the day will come when I can’t anymore.
Sometimes, when I’m angry with my husband.
I am everyday white until I am on a subway and someone says bitch. Then: the manic. Nimble blue of a wolf-eye.
When I’m angry, I’ll undress in our bedroom with the curtains open, so all of Brooklyn can see.
Twenty-nine houses of September and a fire set to each one. Birch tree. Bitch tree: pale debutante, wisps of fern pinned back by luna moths. Let me lick the sugar. Round mooncakes white as Dakota snow. The sugar from your plate when you’re through.
Unmarried
crushed-velvet miniskirt & caravan
of ornaments & trash
in the stink of a Ukrainian nightclub
i drop my body like a spoon
take a cigarette from a man
with my teeth / moon like a parking lot
out in the crowd the pink-haired girls
flickering / electric spores
America & winter live in a darkroom
white emerging in the safelight
at the poker table / cards in a half-moon
like a spoon i drop my body
with my teeth / electric spores
the sky pours itself into my lace-ups
museum of magnolias & husks &
a bee the size of a bullet
in the supermarket i hunt dahlias
a perfect red song / exploding on the nightstand
white emerging in the safelight
35 mm film of oak trees & a blurry nude
under the awning / & in the morning our bed
has become a starlings’ nest
& even when it’s all good and over
i reach for the feathers of you
The Honest Wife
I’m keeping my wedding dress. It’s the sick girl in the coat closet.
Here’s what the biologist taught me in that whiskey bar: if your ancestor dies in a mudslide, you learn to run. We inherit everything. Especially questions.
You called me honest, so I was.
I drive you crazy when I call what happened a daughter. I, sleepless, I, dry-eyed on the E train; from the twenty-fifth floor the green firs are military tanks, mermaids curled in naps.
Yes, everything. Like wasps. Like miscarriages.
I keep meaning to find the suras that tell you everything I can’t.
I love Florida because it’s prehistoric.
I love strip clubs because they’re honest.
When I said hello, you repeated my name like the prettiest cake in a deli glass display, Hala, Hala, spoke the please into my hair, my hair pulled into a ponytail as I danced at our wedding without you.
If it’s not you, give me back my twenty-seventh year.
I lied and said I loved Philadelphia, but really I just loved the idea of a place so old it only knew how to tell the truth.
Turnpike // Ghost
Wrong morning, late train, I wearing red for you.
A girl-thief. Startled,
the train lurched between two smokestack towns.
The subway, eye of a concrete needle.
Orchids, purple-furred. Trashed along with the orange peels.
Tulip-wearer. I never understood Brooklyn,
how a place could be bigger than it was.
The bartenders ask if I want another before I’ve had a first.
You, forest-eyed, a lake in the pocket of your khakis. I launder,
fold the warm clothes,
find a porch inside them. You call me home. Home.
What an Oklahoman sky is made of:
arrow in red dirt, quilt in the home team’s colors.
Chimes to announce the wind.
My father wanted a suburban lawn. Warm biscuits at Red Lobster.
He knows America as an equation to be memorized,
ghost + furniture + eastern turnpikes. Fog as home.
The expressway, congested with commuters,
cars that steer back the way they came. I never did learn to drive.
Even if I wanted to leave, I couldn’t.
Self-Portrait with No More Wine,
like the smoke I chased from puckered lips, rooftop over Bosporus,
watching merles form an invisible net.
I’m not good at it, but I love to sing,
and in Fort Worth I was Madonna, and in Tripoli
I was Fairuz, and here I’m heel to cinder brick waiting for seltzer.
To touch myself always seems ridiculous;
I watch naked girls wiggle their bodies and I copycat them,
moaning and plucked bare. Their hunger is not my hunger,
but still I eat the same donuts, diet pills, organic kale. In the clinics,
I always used a fake name and birth month, my blood inside its glass flask
like a sleeper bomb. Once a nurse asked me about God. I said I have held
the engine of myself against my own ear and, dear miracle,
I recognized the song. Now, when the subway musician
tells me to dance, I dance, both arms pointed toward Mecca.
Step Two: Higher Power
For a while it was easy as inventing an oak tree:
start from the top and worry your way down the trunk.
Or a new continent, emerging green and deserted after
years on water, the simple rapture of the highway going coast
to coast with more America than any of us ever wanted.
I guess you could say I love this city like I love prickly pears,
which is to say, not very much, or only when I’m starving.
My friend sends me photographs of the plane crash
in Curaçao and says they’re opening a restaurant there,
people eating among the dead, which I find gruesome,
but she says isn’t Manhattan built on a slave cemetery,
and every time I’m in an airport I see all the unmade beds,
the houseplants too shriveled to save. I’m afraid of sleep this week.
Next week it’ll be something else: mosquitoes, black holes,
the snap of fireworks from one rooftop to another.
It’s like how I lied about getting sober: it was hard.
I’d pretend it was a road trip, that I’d be drinking again
on Saturday, and the Mondays and Wednesdays would tick by
until it was Saturday, and I’d lie to myself again,
it’s too humid to drink today, I’ll drink tomorrow,
and tomorrow would be my mother’s birthday, then
Monday would arrive like an artless, trilling wife.
This is how a year passed, with hundreds of lies,
like that midnight walk in the French countryside dark,
my sister giggling nervously, no streetlamp for miles,
one footstep after the other, and the only way out ahead.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.
AGHA SHAHID ALI
Gospel: Diaspora
I am marching across the platform
in my black mood sometimes I wear a cowboy hat sometimes I wear a kaffiyeh I like to be the warm engine in America’s boat the man who gave me my hair died one hundred years ago he was a fisherman or a shepherd a hill crest of goats white mottled fur the copper scent of meat and daughters named after gazelles now me, antsy as a moon jealous of white-girl freckles the poppy tattooed on the barmaid’s neck I answer a city in Argentina I’m not the woman pulling stitches through white lace I answer a phone Meimei’s death lifted and lowered Beirut as though on a pulley while fifteen stories below people shuttled around Union Square like bright spiders there’s so much
you don’t know about me I walk down Bedford sometimes just to recite Quran I mourn the trees as they lose their green coats I asked Texas to hang her heart in the window for me my father’s desk globe is stuck on ocean blue I couldn’t bring him ranchland from anywhere even though he asked a long time ago I fell in love and he was a bad man so I yanked every rose from his grassless lawn I burned his emails this is not a metaphor I struck matches against new paper until the sink filled with black clumps this is object permanence while you sleep my father’s globe ocean rises inch by inch
Wife in Reverse
x.
In the old museum, we both avoid looking at the taxidermic display. The animal heart inside the animal chest.
ix.
Before the evening has ended, you have kissed each one of my knuckles. We undress like suitcases opening after a long trip. In Nashville, in Spain, on the back roads of Georgia, when you start the car engine, my first prayer is for you.
viii.
You like to hear about the women in my family. They burn dinner. They divorce and suck their stomachs in. They love red coats and expensive perfume and, when winter light fills the streets in that final, lonesome way, they will walk into a stranger’s life and make it their own.
vii.
If a girl doesn’t have land, then man becomes land.
vi.
Married, fogged. I would leave you. I would take all the blue pills. There would be no state hospital. We took a flight to skip winter. What I hated, I hated in you.
v.
Honeymoon antibiotics. Heat like a long whistle, making a shelter out of leafless trees. When the chlorinated pool appears in the white crags, we use our bodies to catch light.
iv.
I’ve come to love your silences. I surrender myself like a ransacked city. You take the nails but leave the hammer.
iii.
Things we talked about in courtship: superpowers, cities, what makes our fathers cry, the grandmother you hadn’t met, how Palestine isn’t a theory, love as binocular, love as fishhook, alcoholism.
ii.
Things we didn’t talk about in courtship: night terrors, God, where we’d spend Christmases, abortion, how I love to be the last girl to leave the party, bulimia, what made your exes cry, narcissistic injuries.
i.
We won’t forgive each other for the future. I see you pocket the pack of Camels but still ask if you smoke.
Heirloom
My grandfather learned Hebrew because they learn Arabic. I am the daughter of Nafez. The granddaughter of Mohammad.
The granddaughter of Salim.
I usher in each dream with Quran. Yes, Mama, I’m reading the suras again. But I don’t fast. I don’t kneel.
There’s no dessert without fire.
The desert’s bronze capillaries from the airplane. In a marbled room I played poker with a soldier. Ex-soldier, he reminded me.
Tie up your camels and trust in Allah.
The bald woman boasts of her niece’s hair. I make you sing for our houseguests.
The carpenter’s door is falling apart.
There are men who sing to keep the sky from collapsing like a blue tent.
In the settlements I became Shoshanna. I gave Shoshanna something to love. The shirtless teenage boys with rifles, the swimming pools blue as blue.
The abandoned buildings had black graffiti in Hebrew I couldn’t read. Shoshanna asked what it meant, memorized we will come back you cannot keep us out we will return this is ours.
I Can’t Tell Which Haircut in the Photograph Is Me
I used to be sick leather with a house whiskey on ice.
It is 2004. I am about to touch my first. I kiss the bartender who calls me disaster. When I can’t fall asleep I chain-smoke and make gunshots out of
the rain plugs the gutters of Beirut like a hostess refilling wine. The night a man paid me, I skinned my knees so bad that I still have twin scars shaped like
horseshoes of light from the busted streetlamp above the pharmacy. I never emptied my wallet in the coffer. The best house in the city is the one filled with
men asked to stay the night. A good body is one that sleeps when told, hypothalamus soaking acetylcholine like a sponge cake. In upstate New York, I get real thirsty at the truck stop and drink two Coronas without
stopping for the flock of birds murdering a can of Fanta, me anorexic beneath a February trench coat. It’s life or it isn’t. It’s true or it isn’t. Even though I loved hashish, I like to warn my
baby sister turned five the night I hit a stranger with my purse, locked myself out. The purse upturned, spilling gum and cash and tissues already red from my
nosebleed drips on white bathroom tiles, so high I tell everyone they are the prophet’s fingerprints. I don’t know this yet but I will stop drinking. There will be no more long-haired boys with key bumps and ruined veins. I will lean over a fire escape
like a bee, floating above the clover, falling in love with this world. I decide my eyes are
blue. Blue as a Greek island. All summer long, we all sang the same song, like a cold we caught from one another and everyone thought
I was lying and I was.
Can I Apologize Now?
Have I returned all of Beirut:
the trash made high as an Ottoman wall
to keep the city out of the city.
One gull inside an airplane engine:
I haven’t seen Meimei in two years.
I’m afraid of her funeral. The six closets
of petite-size pantsuits and muumuus.
Oh yes, I’ve wanted too much of her,
of the mountain saints
we returned to in the winters,
to pray for a life that wasn’t this,
the gay bars where I tried to turn men,
