Crazily lit, a swamp of white. So the secret is I glow. Blush with dust and ephemeral lungs. This is my architecture, mineral and air, what I have always suspected: I am clamorous. I am a paper daughter. Theater vessel, ovaries charming as nests. Wraithlike masonry, grainy as sugar. Disrobe me and I am a […]
Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan: Aubade
Dancing until the sky darted with gold, eardrums pulse echoes. Even the muezzin is muted, underwater humming as men carry fires for prickly pears and drum each engine into a snare bass. Up ahead the buildings spire into their ugly gray, drops of water startle from the cloudless sky— laundry dribbling from clothespins, or condensation […]
Hala Alyan: Apology
They are burning tires in Tripoli. I bought new perfume, sulfurous, the bottle of clouded glass. Know this: yours is the name that slid first to my lips when the light became enormous and the anxious voices flared like starlings, dozens of them, alit, alit. Only the rubber melts. Steel only chars and the eclipse […]
Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American poet who has lived in different regions of the world, spanning from Oklahoma to Beirut. Hala is pursuing her doctoral degree in the field of clinical psychology and currently resides in Brooklyn. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and her poems have appeared in journals such as Copper Nickel, Third Coast, and The […]