Hala Alyan
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 fortune teller 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 streetful of
:: girl bodies
:: mattresses
:: cooked hearts
Meanwhile, the wolf sleeps in his wolf palace. He drops each ghost into a waterhole and licks his perfect teeth.
We were
a
free
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.
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in Guernica, Prairie Schooner and other literary journals. Her poetry collection ATRIUM was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, while her latest collection, HIJRA, was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and published by Southern Illinois University Press. Her debut novel, SALT HOUSES, is forthcoming by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. Her website can be found at www.halaalyan.com and she resides in Brooklyn.
Return to January 2017 Edition
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 fortune teller 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 streetful of
:: girl bodies
:: mattresses
:: cooked hearts
Meanwhile, the wolf sleeps in his wolf palace. He drops each ghost into a waterhole and licks his perfect teeth.
We were
a
free
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.
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in Guernica, Prairie Schooner and other literary journals. Her poetry collection ATRIUM was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, while her latest collection, HIJRA, was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and published by Southern Illinois University Press. Her debut novel, SALT HOUSES, is forthcoming by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. Her website can be found at www.halaalyan.com and she resides in Brooklyn.
Return to January 2017 Edition