Hala Alyan
Two POEMS
Step Eight: Make Amends
When your husband asks why you’re crying,
say something about so much life you don’t know
what to do with it. Apologize. Say you’re a jealous car
on a scenic freeway, and maybe it’s the tide you want,
or the lilac grove, or the jar that reminds
you to tip. Apologize. Say you get like this sometimes.
The leftover pills taunt you. You realize you hate French,
you’ve always hated French, you don’t know why
you keep trying to learn it, this city is no Paris;
you’ve always been a spiteful girl. Johnny thinks of despair
as the highway deer one kills out of mercy.
Scream that he is an asshole, that there are girls you’d
be kissing if it wasn’t for him, that you are trying to
Pottery Barn your way to quiet. Apologize.
Start a letter to someone who is dead:
Sometimes I want to drive all the way to Connecticut
and break into someone else’s empty pool,
sit at the very bottom like a teacup.
End the letter with a line of x’s.
This is what your wedding vows meant by unalike:
Johnny can kill the deer quietly.
You wake up everyone you know in America.
When I Bit into the Plum the Ants Flooded Out
I’ll dress myself sick 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.
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in Guernica and other literary journals. She is the author of three collections of poetry; the most recent, Hijra, was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, Salt Houses, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.