Tag: Hala Alyan

When This is Over

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as ResistanceLeave a comment

From Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan. It is called “Naturalized.”

Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim.
I’ve already said too much.
Look, the marigolds are coming in. Look, the cuties
are watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites.
They like to understand. They like to play devil’s advocate.
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
No place for a child’s braid. Under
that hospital elevator. When this is over.
When this is over there is no over but quiet.
Coworkers will congratulate me on the ceasefire
and I will stretch my teeth into a country.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a museum.
They like me when I spit my father from my mouth.
There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth.
I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain.
I break a Klonopin with my teeth and swim.
The newspaper says truce and C-Mart
is selling pomegranate seeds again. Dumb metaphor.
I’ve ruined the dinner party. I was given a life. Is it frivolous?
Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos.
There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed
in thirty minutes flat. All that spare water.
All those numbers on the side of the screen.
Here’s your math. Here’s your hot take.
That number isn’t a number.
That number is a first word, a nickname, a birthday song in June.
I shouldn’t have to tell you that. Here’s your testimony,
here’s your beach vacation. Imagine:
I stop running when I’m tired. Imagine:
There’s still the month of June. Tell me,
what op-ed will grant the dead their dying?
What editor? What red-line? What pocket?
What earth. What shake. What silence.

Try to Make it to the Morning

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

By Hala Alyan, a poem called “The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion,” re-posted from Literary Hub (October 17, 2023)

 “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
—Ayelet Shaked

Think of all the calla lilies.
Think of all the words that rhyme with calla.
Isn’t it a miracle that they come back?
The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching is a crime,
so I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog.
What’s five thousand miles between friends?
If you listen close enough,
you can hear the earth crack like a neck.
Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning.
Try to find your heart in the newsprint.
Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count.
The news anchor says oopsie.
The Prime Minister says thanks.
There’s a man wearing his wedding tuxedo to sleep in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light before each bombing.
I dream I am a snake after all.
I dream I do Jerusalem all over again. This time,
I don’t shake my hair down when the soldier tells me to.
I don’t thank them for my passport.
Later my grandfather said they couldn’t have kept it.
You know that, don’t you?
I don’t know what they couldn’t do.
I only know that enormous light.
Only that roar of nothing,
as certain and incorrect as a sermon.

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.