I’ve long admired Hala.
You know when you put a writer in a different category? Hala is the kind of poet and writer I have always dreamt of being.
This is not an exaggeration. I feel emotional and shy about the profundity of being in poetic conversation with someone whose mind and language excite and challenge me, Hala brings me somatically back to my own body, back to this reference in myself. It’s a prayer unfolding to be let into her world. These last two poems have shaken me in different ways and after receiving this latest poem 🥹 I texted her that both this and her last poem are some of my favorite poems of hers that I’ve ever read. And I have read (or am reading) all of her books, here they are so you can read them as well.
It’s incredible to share language with someone. It’s so intimate. To have a shorthand, to speak about love, pain, confusion, hunger… these things that are powerful and extraordinary.
A writer is, at best, a vessel of something alchemical and divine. I see this in Hala’s work, we are so lucky to read her, and to be with her as she processes these times.
May these poems balm you, stoke you, heal you. Give you everything that you need.
For that is the magic of words.
f.
we are my favorite constellation
for Fariha
I want to hear about the oracle.
Last night I dreamt of birds chasing each other into a signature.
I was waiting for a hurricane. A missile.
There’s a village. There’s a finger-snap.
Ask me what I love.
I love the blue tarp. I love the nape of his neck,
straight sugar, how my street looks at dawn.
Don’t you think we all want to be writing about gardenias?
I dance around the living room to that goddamn shark song,
and what kind of seed can I be?
With my gabapentin and weepy baths.
Look what I’ve done:
I was polite. I was a pencil skirt. I read Faulkner.
I smiled because I’m a flirt. I smiled because I was afraid,
because a broken bone isn’t a metaphor,
because I’m out of inventions.
Fifteen years I’ve been a pulpit
and what good did it do me?
They still looked away.
They still. They still
and I’m more alive than I am afraid.
In Beirut there was a song I loved:
a man asking a woman a question.
Where had she slept.
In whose bed. Under whose sky.
My girl. My girl.
What were you raised on?
Frosted flakes. Tornado watches. A video of a man cradling his son.
My girl. My country.
What will make you mine?
I’ve seen you cry over a singed cathedral, stray kittens, a shuttered storefront.
This is your daughter. This is your limb.
Your artery. Your road. Your doing.
I danced for you in the streets.
You told me to forget so I forgot.
Look how long I wear my hair.
Look how I wear white.
My girl. My country.
I love your forests, your hawks, your factories.
I left a sea and found another
but where is July when you need it most?
Where did you sleep last night?
In the dream I had the name of a flower,
I danced pliés in front of a mosque.
My girl. My girl.
Everywhere I look there are flowers.
Red throat. Red sugar.
There are no gods in this room but.
Ask me again what I love.
There is no god but.
There is no god but.
There is no god but.
I’m no god but.
Ask me again what I love.
🙏