Hala Alyan

cantfindit

HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist. Source

Honeymoon

Of this room remember heat. A fight with my father and

glass evil eyes. The television sparking like a glamorous fish.

 

We’ve turned off every lightbulb, fan each other with foreign

magazines. I take photographs of stray dogs. In the car,

 

the Turkish driver listens to horse races on the radio.

I won, he tells us. I dress like a pillar. I want to burn the verbs

 

I mispronounce to the Egyptian waiter. My uterus bleeds from Athens

to Istanbul and the moon is a spider tracking its white mud

 

across the sky. Orange blossoms open like pepper in the courtyard.

Everywhere, blue rooftops. Antibiotics for my infected jaw.

 

We take Rome with us to Rome. At the passport control line,

you tell me to let you speak. You tell them I'm with you.

Published:

2017

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2022

Themes:

Family

Intersectionality & Culture

Poems of Place

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds that takes place in two or more words in proximity to each other within a line; usually refers to the repetition of internal vowel sounds in words that do not end the same.

Couplets

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”