The Twenty-Ninth Year

by Hala Alyan

  Gospel: Rumi

  Every wound reveals its own repair. I smuggle myself until I tick. What is love if not falconry? Tugging the humble out of something wild. A woman takes her sorrow to the river and drowns it, pale feathers and all. A woman explodes herself. There is no place where you cannot sing: The needle in the doll. Gótico. Nashville. Vinalhaven where cicadas warbled back and I folded my legs around you. And the girls are getting sick. The tide doesn’t mean to heed the moon. Some things we just do. Like how I dreamt I left you. Light woke me up; I could still taste the Mediterranean, a man’s dirty mouth. Hunger enters me like another night, the sky a good dark meat, grilled with stars. I want you in the Pacific. The Rio Grande. I am borderland flooding. The dream where I pull their bodies from the water, kiss them until they speak again. Swim.

  Every hangover begins with an inventory.

  DAVID CARR

  New Year

  I slept with your boyfriend. I stole books from the library. I pretended to be having a nightmare. It was an errant breeze that slammed the door; she’d already left. I never tried to call you back. I woke up and found a pile of twenties on the hotel nightstand. I mostly drank for show. I’m prettier than your wife. I still dream of what I did to you. There was no family emergency. There was no migraine. I took the twenties. I made him up. I made it all up.

  The Worst Ghosts

  A thing must have hands

  [to mourn]

  what it cannot touch

  Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war. I smoked pot with a guy I’d known for ages. I slept through the airport bombing. When the window facing the road shattered, I kept a piece in my mother’s glove compartment.

  Sometimes I’ll make myself thin

  [enough]

  to slip through walls

  [But if you don’t name the tree]

  My grandmother’s couch milks itself into the carpet

  [how can you love it]

  Palestine, a name that means

  The worst ghosts are the ones that don’t come back

  The officer at JFK scans me. My body, ghost white, flickering on his screen.

  Pretty boy. Blue eyes.

  Takes my fingerprint and winks.

  Cheer up. You’re home.

  Telling the Story Right

  Twelve shots because odd numbers are unlucky.

  A Wednesday of blue sky. Cell phone crammed like a piñata with texts.

  Goddamnit Hala why don’t

  The airport

  They took

  The men

  The men

  The men

  Two years later, I fill a flask with warm rum. Men line the neighborhood with rifles. A boy swarms my body. It’s not your war, you know. I want to spit in his mouth.

  In America you’d never

  I bought a rose from those Syrian

  Black hair

  Black eyes

  A Thursday of blue sky. I was four. My mother was pregnant. We drove all the way to Damascus without stopping. Too many black-haired women in the airport line. When my brother moves to California, my father tells him not to wear his kaffiyeh.

  Baba your hair

  Baba your hair

  Baba at least wash those jeans

  I loved the soldier who winked at me. I loved the soldier who tossed me a cigarette. The Nile in me, the bitch, knew what to do, a switchblade tucked between ankle and boot.

  Baba they took the men

  Baba they took your hair

  I shook the chain-link fence near the border and gave a false name. Lorelei. I kissed the night guard, stalling. His eyes silver as a wedding ring; he showed me the dangerous thing in his hands. You better use those legs, Lorelei. I did.

  Call Me to Prayer

  A cigarette burn on my forearm. Pink and round as a tongue tip.

  There’s Beirut when the floods finally come: bits of tinsel and hamburger wrappers floating through the streets. The city glazed like a donut.

  In a whorehouse a man tells me to go home to my baba. A cigarette burn on his forearm. Three brothers he buried in Muslim soil.

  In Jerusalem, in El Paso, every road repeats its own Bible name.

  The towers. Five thousand six hundred and seventy-five miles later, the tunnels.

  In the exile’s suitcase, a carpet of dead grass. Seven persimmons. A dandelion stem skinny as a grenade pin.

  All night the wind muscles through the cypress trees, calls me to prayer with the bees.

  There is no God but God. This is mountain country, this is evacuation country, this is land of American shrapnel and strip clubs.

  No god but.

  In a night trimmed with moon, lovers kiss their dead like lovers.

  Gospel: Beirut

  Tell a girl to take her pants

  Neon-lit whorehouse with windows. I am nothing but

  a body.

  off. Beirut, dozen limbs of a felled tree. Lightning storm that cut

  Birthday party where everyone drank gin from

  teacups.

  electricity in seven towns. Someone made paper crowns out of

  Under the blackout moon I asked any god to make me

  better.

  newspaper articles on white phosphorus. Slut that

  First boy I loved used six phones to promise my father he’d break

  me.

  calls your mama a liar at the drive-in. Tell a girl to

  Headlights on pavement, tinsel. This is how you burn nineteen years

  down.

  take her pants off. A girl knows you want her to

  take her pants off. And she will only if

  Nineteen in Retrograde

  It wasn’t my Eden, the centrifugal muscle of Beirut,

  always a trumpet of bras blooming over balcony railings.

  Unpronounceable name. Here razorblade, here fishnets,

  strutting down Hamra in heels and a black coat.

  I forgot to water the flowers. I actually went to church,

  like a girl in a bad movie, lit one candle for myself and two for you.

  Beneath the coat was skin, and beneath the skin I was a million

  fireworks going off in every direction. You can hurt something.

  You can give it back. After you I swore off everything but white boys,

  sold myself like a country. When I’m through I’m through,

  and so I smoked every cigarette in the house, went to the library after hours

  to bang on a door I knew was locked. As if I were suddenly someone new.

  As if I had the right girlhood somewhere, turning the other cheek

  only to later say I did, praying to Saint Monica. Patron saint of alcoholism

  and disappointment. Wives. Isn’t mimicry love? My girl hand in her girl hand.

  A foxhole between shaved legs. By the fire we made more fire,

  kicked pebbles in to watch them spark and fluffed our hair

  like trouble. You wouldn’t kiss me anymore; what was I supposed to do?

  There were no more fast cars, no more naps in empty bathtubs. In Urdu,

  kal means yesterday and tomorrow. I saw you waiting for the light to change

  and went home with you. By then, I’d heard my father’s voice break.

  I’d stood in a police station and read aloud the texts. I went home with you and

  I will regret this yesterday and tomorrow and in three languages.

  When the phone calls began, I swore to everyone it wasn’t you.

  O Monica, what I’d have sold to have been right. To tattoo

  the right name on my wrist. To have told him no. Just once.

  Pray Like You Mean It

  I do it like my mama taught The Entirely Merciful a full breath

  before new

  verse my mind a defiant child told to sit still upending all the gas cans

  of memories while I whisper into the pillowcase

  unwashed for two

  Saturdays of the worlds m
y mind an

  audition tape of all the ways

  I’m no good and never will be a full

  Z on the inside of left wrist

  bad daughter bad sister bad It is You wife who wore white for another man

  every trashed bedroom hundred-dollar meals thrown up

  one tequila

  over speed limit fleecing girls who lit up all of

  Paris

  a cairn for help of empty beer bottles

  shining green as cash

  fingers counting my lashes a stolen bag of cocaine

  white on white on

  white my white mug filled with seltzer

  and lime o please

  somebody the path of those upon tell my mama to

  send me any song so long as it makes me cry to show me

  how to make this

  life this god again those who are led astray

  mine

  Not a Mosque

  Now I can ask the alcoholic to return her counterfeit Rolex.

  I lost the statue necklace, the thin red thread that snapped during the film.

  Every prayer I deliver includes my brother. Husband, mother, father.

  My sister at her high school parties, filling a tumbler with vodka.

  I told her once she was going out with a loaded gun. She laughed.

  (One year my hair was pink because I wanted the boys to cheer.)

  I toasted the spiders on the antlered delphiniums. Here’s to the glass

  crowned in salt. Here’s to the half-sunk ship of greasy napkins.

  Baby sister who makes a diorama of the silvery planets. Now I toast to God.

  In the subway, someone has nailed a corkboard over a billboard,

  but there is nothing on it, so I dig my nails into a signature,

  the one I stole from my father years ago, a hasty loop that was my first lie.

  You’re Not a Girl in a Movie

  Like white electric tapeworms wriggling across

  the dark sky,

  each firework is followed by another. The third day of July,

  seven years ago now,

  I woke up naked in my bed. He said his name was Barry. He was Irish,

  surly,

  he texted me during the fireworks to say he had a wife,

  that this was an indiscretion, he should stop following girls to bars.

  I was older then, if that makes sense.

  I was already sixty, and resigned to the nasty animal of me.

  I hated gin. I drank gin.

  (I tried to be decent. You wanted my body, so take it.)

  It was still possible to move to California then, and I wrote that down

  in the margin of a notebook—

  California?, like I was trying it on, a floral sundress in the wrong weather.

  Everyone wants a rock bottom. Some Icarus shit.

  But the truth is some holes keep going, yawning, heady, one mistake

  becomes three:

  there’s always a dark darker than the dark you know.

  Step One: Admit Powerlessness

  I loved the paper gowns, too, my slept-in body discarded

  and remade into jail bait, the ER doctor pressing a handful

  of brightly colored condoms into my palm. I won’t call it rape,

  because a tree can’t be killed twice; God,

  lurking in the X-ray of my abdomen, a single apostrophe

  between the bowed ribcages, capillaries like typewriter ribbon.

  I am most miraculous on my back, one earring lost on 148th,

  my mouth thin as the people I come from, each leg

  palmed astray, unable to ask for anything other than this.

  The word pulled through me like a needle’s eye, daughtering

  into seventeen bruises, no, because Mama didn’t even want me

  to get on that airplane, no, and I did it like America:

  what wasn’t mine I took, ambulance lights red as peppers,

  two years starving on bread and lemon water, me

  at the door of somebody’s wife, pulling electric bills from my purse.

  Arabi-girl, baba-girl. Rich boys, pretty boys, tell the

  boys as angry as Nevada, to own a thing you must want it.

  Out in the cold night I was a body renamed, emerging from a sea

  of white girls, my hoodie too thin, veins blue as hydrangeas,

  laughing with the Columbia boys on Morningside,

  chasing one tallboy with the other. Through the bar window,

  a lightbulb exploded like a white tusk in the evening,

  and when the sun finally rose, I believed in a different god.

  Tattler

  In Europe an ex-lover left me to eat alone. A shy busboy brought me an extra macaron, pink in his hand. His eyes dart around before he mutters in Arabic, Ana min Iraq.

  the bar where a man said

  I’ll fuck the Arab out of you

  the news report where a man said

  O Allah my daughter’s daughter

  (a braid without a head to swing from)

  I tell the busboy I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. His eyes the color of cognac.

  We shred the cocktail napkins into a pile of white. He says when the Americans came to his town, they didn’t care who, they asked the women to stay in their houses, even when I say I am good man, they still shot at the neighborhood trees. His favorite birds, the chattering ones, fell from the branches.

  Like this, he says. The white fluttering from his fingers.

  birdsong:

  the things that wash up on white shores

  panties and televisions

  jukeboxes and toddlers

  I am honoring my script. I remove my shoes carefully. I let the Israeli soldier run her fingers through my hair for a long time, until it feels more like love than anything else, and for a moment I wonder what she’d do if I shut my eyes, started singing until it was over. She follows every curl. She smiles thinly when I tell her not to worry, she couldn’t brush it if she tried. Don’t you understand, I want to say.