by Hala Alyan
seaman dialect, waxed everything,
sunset I dyed my hair after, sea I refused
to swim in for years, until the night I did,
a white boy’s hands pulling the tide,
seven million years of dead mornings,
a grubby sheet over our heads.
Ordinary Scripture
Everything haunts: sex, hands. If your house wants rain, so be it.
Against the sheets our bodies are dark treble clefs,
our skin making a sound like ant wings or ghosts. We love
because it makes a mockery of our fathers, the roaming clock
bystander to our teeth against teeth. I burrow across the sheets
like a shark. I spend my mornings circling the bars,
watching videos of radium, green and cool as a lovemark.
I miss the periodic table, all those shy, telepathic letters.
There was a chemistry teacher years ago who held my hand
while I cried. I used the word queer. I haven’t since.
It’s summer now. When the wind stirs the honey locusts,
an olive snow falls. We shine flashlights,
walk in the almost-dark until we reach the docks. Wet grass.
A fishhook, tangled in our bikinis and empty coolers.
In the end, we remake love over and over, like unwed atoms,
into forgery, into need, busying our hands with forks, unmade beds,
the magnolia trees, whatever quiet is the one we can bear.
Dear Layal,
When it became clear that America wouldn’t apologize, our mothers decided it was time to leave. The YMCA pools, the cafeteria trays, and the tornado sirens vanished, but the houses we snuck in our girl-pockets, whole acres of cotton crops and the state’s best Ferris wheel dug into our hipbones like quarters. We’ve both been trespassed. But I was so eager for touch I didn’t stop to ask questions. Since we are being honest here, I’ll tell you I envied you topless in the Barcelona sea, your hallucinogens, the way you danced like an animal caught in its own net. The last time I drank I spoke to the trees and they had your voice. They said it was too late to go back. My life glittered like drugstore nail polish. I’m not here to talk to you about Fatima; we both wanted to become her and we failed. Instead, I’ll burn Berlin to the ground. I’ll take you back to Texas and find a motel Bible to steal. If we look long enough, we’ll find what our mothers did to us. You can blame everything on a highway, your baba’s temper, the prison cell your grandfather squatted in for six months. A girl meets her madness with two good hands. A girl falls asleep in Central Park. I told all my good stories to your brother. Here’s one last one: A girl unloves her house, but it is too late. The house is her eyes and her ears and the wind she pins her hair by. Layal, I meant every lie I told you. Some things can only be endured. The night our fathers gambled, they ate like kings with the winnings. The god our grandmother forgot told her to smile at the floating specks of dust in the afternoon.
On the Death of WWE Professional Wrestler Chyna
The first woman I wanted to touch: topography of darting muscles
and sinew, a body made for ambulances.
It was Oklahoma. I was seven, my heart was broken,
and you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
I loved you best all rewilding: hooker-red lips, black leather
for miles, a man named Hunter to love.
The women I knew feared the fist; not you.
When your action figure came out, I bought two.
I made your plastic legs part. Seven became ten became twenty-two.
What I mean is I drank and snorted. What I mean is I tore bread
so the birds would come. I watched your sex tape to see if you’d cry.
I wanted to see the secrets of a woman who had none.
You dove into a fish tank once, after too many cocktails.
They had to yank you out, a headline screaming
The Great Fall of, but I think you hit your mark.
A woman can spend a lifetime wiping a man from her thighs.
Chyna, I went for a run yesterday and realized it was spring already,
the trees shaking their Marie-Antoinette wigs into a savage green.
The fog lifted as I ran; this world brightens with or without us.
Recognizing the miracle becomes the miracle.
The Victorians had it right: a woman will be as small
as the world needs her to be. But you already knew that, didn’t you.
Cliffhanger
Yesterday I told it again some Brooklyn teahouse a woman asked about Beirut and I was talking about blackouts & virginity before I knew it in some ways I will never stop being a drinker in all the ways that count
I like the rehearsal of life more than life how could you let him do that aghast the woman wants to know how could you let him get away with it I went to police stations I drank alone I hit a pizzeria door with
my fist I thought I was getting back at him like Plath and her daddy the story changes depending on where I am Marfa or Tulum or my own bathtub sometimes I tried to make it stop sometimes it’s raining but the truth is more
simple than I like I hurt a boy and the boy ruined me my family for years received these phone calls unknown caller saying your daughter is a whore a bad girl saying rape saying
you won’t recognize her body (here the woman gasps) when you find it look we all become our worst stories this is mine I went back for more nobody made me do that I just hated being ignored
that’s the part I leave out there was a war we kept the news on used the couch not the bed I couldn’t forgive him so I apologized instead have you ever done that I ask the woman shakes her head
she is fuming says I hope he has daughters he has sons I reply well I hope he has daughters I hope this happens to his sister stop I say please stop I leave this out too how I still defend him how a wound
like that over a decade becomes a kind of heart how I sometimes imagine an awning in Beirut rain no umbrella him rooted in place me clearing my throat I rehearse this how I’ll go still
& say you became the story I was most addicted to & say I knew it was you all along do you understand I knew
Aleppo
I talk back to the videos. Someone ate paper. Someone isn’t eating anymore.
Mornings like this, I wish I never loved anyone. What is it to be a lucky city, a row of white houses strung with Christmas lights.
There is no minute
A fortuneteller told me I’d marry one of Aleppo’s sons. That was seven years ago.
to spare.
Yesterday I dreamt my grandmother was a child who led me by the hand to a cave. Inside I found the wolf. I buried a dagger in his hot throat.
This is the dark the world let in, and learned
:: to stomach
:: to shoulder
:: to keep
I woke up with my hands wet.
They are just
This ugly human impulse to make it mine.
hours away.
The Syria in my grandmother is a decade too old. When she dies, she will take it with her.
This is how a lone bomb can erase a lineage: the nicknames for your mother, the ghost stories, the only song that put your child to sleep.
No one is evacuating me.
Your citadel fed to the birds. Your mosque. Someone will make an art project out of your tweets.
My daughter.
The prophet’s birthday arrives without a single firework.
Surrender. Or die.
Or die.
In the city bombs peck the streets into a braille that we pretend we cannot read. A street full of
:: girl bodies
:: mattresses
:: cooked hearts
Meanwhile, the wolf sleeps in his wolf palace. He drops each ghost into a water hole and licks his perfect teeth.
We were
a
free
&nb
sp; people
We could paper all of Arkansas with your missing.
May you give us nowhere else to look. May you burn every newspaper with your name on it. Every textbook. Every memorial.
This too.
Upstate I
The weather is another character. Today, alabaster coast with rain and wind. I run through the pines. Emerald, lanky-branched, decked with dew. I am one half of the car winding its signature toward the state park. I have found my grandmother in the dream. The car remembers the flank of asphalt. I shut my eyes against the drizzle through the open window and hear her say death can be good. The day is a nothing color; when the cemetery appears through the fog, a sudden wind scatters the birds like a shotgun. The asphalt remembers a better car. I want to rename the cemetery, the wind, the farm stand we stopped at for cider. From the hilltop the lake is a green almond, two geese interrupting the silence with their animal bark. This is how the clouds convert you, replacing one future with another, and the whole car ride back is quiet and unheated, you are crying because you nearly forgot, because the car is good, the fog is good, the dream is good.
Upstate II
A century of sex and heartbreak in this country house. Crowned by pines. Tonight I almost drank wine again. History does that—a telescope from both ends, the undesirous memory of smallness, how I snake toward myself only to discover I have disturbed no one’s nest but my own. I could summon the exact taste of the wine, the tart red, could imagine how the lively falconer in my brain would wake up, release her dozen hungry birds into circles. I want to tell you about the wine. You, sunburnt in Australia, driving into the desert to look up at new stars. Of course, there are things we have buried together: two apartments, errant hairs. Embryo. In the X-ray of your hand, the bones glow like lace, the same ones that pin me against mattresses. I never told you how regal I felt that night in the hot tub, the winter air furring my eyelashes and hair with frost. Months later, cicadas. A foliage not yet turned. Someday I’ll learn to drive and take you to the state border, ask you to lie back while I point out the dead things I found in the night sky. Darling, I work by the hourglass. I write songs so that someday you may sing.
Thirty
To love the hibiscus, you must first love the monsoon,
the silent alphabet you and your brother invented
to keep your mother from leaving. I never told you—
sometimes I go to Bloomingdale’s just to stand under
the majestic lights, watching the diamond rings glitter
on seabeds. Though there is no ocean for miles,
I am happy, landlocked, dry as a gecko. It’s been decades
since the kleptomania, Baba’s wallet, a tennis bracelet
someone forgot on the bathroom sink. But I still feel
criminal on Fridays. I keep the seventeen houses.
I keep the baby teeth. When I was much younger,
I heard a woman in a Midwestern diner sigh,
Thirty, honey. Can you believe it? I couldn’t. I can’t.
Someone died. It was a day. I ate ice cream until
I felt sick and my mother lied to me about her mother.
Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the presses and journals that have published my work. Massive gratitude goes to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the lovely people there—Lauren Wein, Taryn Roeder, Pilar Garcia-Brown, Larry Cooper, Martha Kennedy, Rachel Fershleiser, and Leila Meglio, among others—who have championed my work, old and new. A particularly exuberant thank-you to Jenny Xu, my generous and magnificent editor, for turning this book into what it was meant to be all along. And, of course, endless gratitude to my brilliant agent, Michelle Tessler.
You’re only as strong as your tribe, and I have a mighty one: Michael, Atheer, Olivia, Dalea, Kiki, Andre, Karam, Alexis, Sarah, Darine, Stefanie, Mark, Bill, Dana, Ash, Susanna, Angie, Donavan, Tanya, Sara A., Madeline, Justin, Hania, Sweta, Ben, Karin, and Anthony. I love you all and you’ve gotten me through more than you know.
Thank you to Yardenne, Iris, Hannah, and Karen.
Thank you to my 3arabi (and honorary 3arabi) literary kin, who have inspired and supported my work for years—Randa, Fady, Marwa, Susan, Deema, Nomi, Phil, Hayan, Mira, Kaveh, Naomi, Ru, Maria, and Zeina, among countless others. Thank you to sam sax, Cyrus Cassells, and Aja Monet.
I thank the heavens every single day for the family I was born into. I appreciate each and every one of you: Mama, Baba, Miriam, Talal, Omar, Diana, Layal, Reem, my uncles and cousins. I am my mother’s daughter and I am my father’s daughter, and everything else is secondary.
Mimo, whenever I get cold feet, I remember you reading these poems on that turbulent airplane. Thank you.
Talal, there aren’t enough words, but I’ll keep collecting them. The Atlantic is happy because she has known the Pacific.
And of course—thank you to my newer family, the Heiserman and Perkins clans, for opening their homes and lives to me.
Thank you to the amazing communities I work with at NYU and the Islamic Center, and to my profound, inspiring clients and students.
Last, but in practice first, thank you to my husband, Johnny Perkins, for being the one I’d choose, over and over, in a heartbeat.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of these journals, where the following poems appear or are forthcoming:
Adroit Journal: “Can I Apologize Now?” Arkansas International: “Step Eight: Make Amends” and “When I Bit into the Plum the Ants Flooded Out.” Believer: “Wife in Reverse.” Blackbird: “A Love Letter to My Panic // A Love Letter to My Husband,” “New Year,” and “The Temperance (XIV) Card.” Boaat: “You’re Not a Girl in a Movie.” Colorado Review: “Either I’m Coming Back or I’m Not.” Crazyhorse: “Step One: Admit Powerlessness.” Diode: “The Honest Wife” and “Truth.” Great Weather for Media: “Armadillo.” Halal If You Hear Me (anthology): “Ordinary Scripture” and “Common Ancestors.” Juxtapose: “Call Me to Prayer.” The Missing Slate: “The Worst Ghosts.” Mizna: “Chaos Theory” and “Halfway to July.” North American Review: “The Socratic Method.” The Offing: “Pray Like You Mean It” and “Cliffhanger.” Poetry: “Honeymoon” and “Oklahoma.” Rumpus: “Instructions for a Wife,” “Dear Layal,” “Step Two: Higher Power,” and “I’m Not Speaking First.” Thrust: “Aleppo.” Tinderbox: “On the Death of WWE Professional Wrestler Chyna” and “Even When I Listen, I’m Lying.”
About the Author
Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist, a clinical psychologist, and the author of Salt Houses, Four Cities, Atrium, and Hijra. She lives in New York.
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