The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems

by Hala Alyan

Show me that shoebox heart of yours. Don’t be scared. I was trying your name on for size.

I don’t have time to write about the soul. There are bodies to count. 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 won’t say what I paid for this mattress. You can’t put a price on good sleep. You can’t put a corpse back together. One bomb dives into the sky like a rose. If I don’t say rose, you’ll skip ahead to the end.

You can’t put a corpse back together. One bomb dives into the sky like a rose. If I don’t say rose, you’ll skip ahead to the end. I think I’m in love with the murdered poet.

Who sweeps the glass? Who rakes the graves like an itch? The screens will spoil my eyesight. After all that Lasik. After all that shelling, a mother walks her child over rubble. Prays the young will forget.

After all that shelling, a mother walks her child over rubble. Prays the young will forget.

On the telephone, your grandfather tells you the land is coating his eyes. He tells you it is worth being alive just to see that blue.

Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It’s done nothing for Palestine.

Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.

ICD-10-CM diagnostic code F51.4. There is a number for every anguish.

and there are loves that burn like Sunday and there is a grave an hour from the sea and the only thing left to do is fill it

This is the hot jinx of daughtering: we knew our mothers and our mothers knew dust.

You speak of nostalgia like you’re the only one who ever lost something,

Losing something is just revising it. After this love there will be more love.

In the darkest dark, I wait for the moon that turns you back.

The cost of wanting something is who you are on the other side of getting it.