I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
it’s sunset before I know it. I’m supposed
to rest, but that’s where the children live.
In the hot mist of sleep. Dream after dream.
Instead, I obsess. I draw stars on receipts.
Everybody loves the poem.
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee.
It’s done nothing for Palestine.
There are plants out West that emerge only after fires.
They listen for smoke. I wrote the poem
after weeks of despair, hauling myself
like a rock. Everyone loves the poem.
The plants are called fire-followers,
but sometimes they grow after the rains. At night,
I am a zombie feeding on the comments.
Is it compulsive to watch videos?
Is it compulsive to memorize names?
Rafif and Ammar and Mahmoud.
Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias:
I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles.
A plant waits for fire to grow.
A child waits for a siren. It must be a child.
Never a man. Never a man without a child.
There is nothing more terrible
than waiting for the terrible. I promise.
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.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Hala Alyan’s “Half-Life in Exile” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,