The Twenty-Ninth Year Quotes

“I've been working on the same joke for years. The punchline is you were happy all along.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“there’s always a dark darker than the dark you know”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“In the city bombs peck the streets into a braille that we pretend we cannot read.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“The Temperance (XIV) Card

“Highway 17 in Texas: we stop to watch buzzards
supping on a roadkill porcupine. The mountains are a
Persian rug of emerald and brown, wolfish clouds
gathering rain. The towns stack up like a tarot deck.
A row of Mexican women stand at clotheslines,
shake the static from dresses. The fortune you believe
is the one you'll get. Eres muy sexy, says the wrinkled man
at the gas station. Eres divina. The jade cottonwoods
speak of flooding; the yucca tattle on the south.
You might say this about exile, mountains eroded by
six hundred years of women's feet, the heavy press
from babies and water buckets. Forty miles south,
mothers find their daughters' bodies in boxes.
The dusk is a murder of magenta and indigo
against the black land, as monstrously beautiful
as a rape tree. As we drive, a brown woman names
the dying plants. She reads the cacti like an open palm.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“Marriage is sweeping the floors of a room you're not sure you want to die in.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“ten years, a man will fall in love because he recognizes the Midwest in me. He”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year

“I just loved the idea of a place so old it only knew how to tell the truth.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“We inherit everything. Especially questions.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“You made me up, all heels and mascara. You love the instrument you refuse to play.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“The Victorians had it right: a woman will be as small / as the world needs her to be. But you already knew that, didn't you.”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems

“I burned his emails / this is not a metaphor”
― Hala Alyan, The Twenty-Ninth Year: Poems