Hala Alyan

I'm allergic to hair dye and silver. Of the natives,
I love the Aztecs most of all, the way they lit fires
in the gouged chests of men to keep the world spinning.
I've seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn't eat bread
I will never be as beautiful as the night I danced in a garage,
anorexic, decked in black boots, black sweater, black jeans,
hip-hop music and a girl I didn't know pulling my hips
to hers. Hunger is hunger. I got drunk one night
and argued with the Pacific. I was twenty. I broke
into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar. I wasn't twenty.
In the winter of those years I kept Christmas lights
strung around my bed and argued with the Italian landlady
who lived downstairs about turning the heat off,
and every night I wanted to drink but didn't.
...

They leave the country with gasping babies and suitcases
full of spices and cassettes. In airports,

they line themselves up like wine bottles.
The new city twinkles beneath an onion moon.

Birds mistake the pebbles of glass on the
black asphalt for bread crumbs.

*

If I drink, I tell stories about the women I know.
They break dinner plates. They marry impulsively.

When I was a child I watched my aunt throw a halo
of spaghetti at my mother. Now I'm older than they were.

*

In an old-new year, my cousin shouts ana bint Beirut
at the sleeping houses. She clatters up the stairs.

I never remember to tell her anything. Not the dream
where I can't yell loud enough for her to stop running.

And the train comes. And the amar layers the stones
like lichen. How the best night of my life was the one

she danced with me in Paris, sharing a hostel bed,
and how sometimes you need one knife to carve another.

*

It's raining in two cities at once. The Vendôme plaza
fills with water and the dream, the fountain, the moon

explodes open, so that Layal, Beirut's last daughter,
can walk through the exit wound.
...

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 cemetary,
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 liked 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, triling 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.
...

How many men have I taken. Swung from the tips of my fingers. Led to a lake of silk-wet sheets. The lovers of gasoline, brick dust, the zenith of this twenty-ninth year. Their hair plastered with late rain. In a red pickup I sit with a black-haired woman who calls me mama, let myself believe her talk of border-crossing, her gritty fingernails tapping my forearm. She tells me that she died on this day, in a past life where she was a curandera. The bartender kicked us out; I let her lips skim my earlobe. Yes, I am domestic. I love my husband like a fire loves Californian brush. But there is nothing like two women quick as jaguars in the Texan dark, our madness catching up to us
...

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 fool 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

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.
...

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, frost-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:

arrows 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 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.
...

Of this room remember heat. A fight with my father and
glass evil eyes. The television sparking like a glamorous fish.

We've turned off every lightbulb, fan each other with foreign
magazines. I take photographs of stray dogs. In the car,

the Turkish driver listens to horse races on the radio.
I won, he tells us. I dress like a pillar. I want to burn the verbs

I mispronounce to the Egyptian waiter. My uterus bleeds from Athens
to Istanbul and the moon is a spider tracking its white mud

across the sky. Orange blossoms open like pepper in the courtyard.
Everywhere, blue rooftops. Antibiotics for my infected jaw.

We take Rome with us to Rome. At the passport control line,
you tell me to let you speak. You tell them I'm with you.
...

For a place I hate, I invoke you often. Stockholm's: I am eight years old and the telephone poles are down, the power plant at the edge of town spitting electricity. Before the pickup trucks, the strip malls, dirt beaten by Cherokee feet. Osiyo, tsilugi. Rope swung from mule to tent to man, tornadoes came, the wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard. This was before the gold rush, the greed of engines, before white men pressing against brown women, nailing crosses by the river, before the slow songs of cotton plantations, the hymns toward God, the murdered dangling like earrings. Under a redwood, two men signed away the land and in history class I don't understand why a boy whispers sand monkey. The Mexican girls let me sit with them as long as I braid their hair, my fingers dipping into that wet black silk. I try to imitate them at home — mírame, mama — but my mother yells at me, says they didn't come here so I could speak some beggar language. Heaven is a long weekend. Heaven is a tornado 
siren canceling school. Heaven is pressed in a pleather booth at the Olive Garden, sipping Pepsi between my gapped teeth, listening to my father mispronounce his meal.
...

I had lived in a desert before. I did. I forgot the za'atar my mother said she fed me in Iraq. I forgot my grandmother's house in Soo-ree-yaa. There I was, eating the prickly pears even though they always made my tongue itch. A teacher in Texas told me I'd never learn how to pronounce my own name in English and she was right. I wept until my mother took me to McDonald's. In that house I was the only child. I danced in the hot winter. In ten years, a boy will leave marks on my arm because I call him a redneck. I stole a Barbie pink windbreaker from the cubbyhole at school. There was nothing in the pockets. Even before the sun rose, my father went outside to smoke and watch the birds fly east. He loved the ugly ones best of all.

=

I had never seen true desert before: cactus beds and milk-white sand, sand that ran for days, the lipstick-red of dusk. There I was, digging through piles of library books to steal the best ones, lumping my bedsheets into a mouth to kiss. I wasn't quick enough to stop the boy's hand under my shirt. I starved myself to starve my mother. In that house we made a house for each of us, the cornfields a row of brunettes after the winter drought. In ten years, a man will fall in love because he recognizes the Midwest in me. He will leave a note in the pleat of my coat. When the final box was taped up, my father eyed the house once more before turning back toward the Dodge, destined to do it all over again.
...

I'll dress myself cheap as a red candle. I'll keep my hair long for you to yank. Slink myself in black. Silk panties. Bangles as bright as India. This body is yours more than mine. The trees are broken into temples, one slow noose to the next. My breasts smell like cigars and perspiration, you have sparrowed into my arteries: heartbeat, dial tone. You remember, yes, the seeds we ate by the handful, the Mexican sun finding us wherever we went. The world doesn't want loyalty, so what's the point of asking? The heart spoils the body and the body spoils the air. I stole your name and at night, alone, I whisper it into the dark: the vowels none of my great-grandmothers could've said.
...