The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems

by Hala Alyan

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.

I want to fight for a country even if that country didn’t want me even if when my mother bought a patch of land & tried to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me because my name is my father’s name because he was born in Palestine and so impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t have me you know the way our mothers did

I understand like God understands: every altar is built first with fear. Don’t say I never helped you.

I still like my brain. This feels as impossible as anything, but it’s true—I feel its lure bright as a camera bulb sometimes, the magic and the grief like two rivers necking where they meet.

You can believe in anything, so why not believe this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming. I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.