Self-Portrait as My Mother

By HALA ALYAN

 

When the warplanes come, I pluck them
from the blue sky like Tic Tacs. The cupboard

is always full of honey and needles. Merlot and Marlboros.
The rumor of America around my neck.

On the third day of the month I bleed a pond,
toss a gun into its mouth. I am the gun.

The chamber empties into a Fairuz song:
Take the color of the trees with you.

California is my safe word. O bird o bird.
The wink of a car on a highway.

I know a nation by its germs. Its endangered water.
The desert is an unborn son and every night

I claim him, his black hair spiky as a cactus.
Give me a fate and I’ll lose it. The border runs

crooked as a love line on a bride’s palm. I sing.
I mop the floors. I can’t kill for enough clean. At the brocantes,

I buy mirrors and clocks, lavender seeds,
birdfeeders, fill my house with the belongings of dead men.

My breasts rise. I read the drugstore horoscopes—
my moon is in Sagittarius, sun’s in Akka,

heaven’s an empty sky, border’s open, there’s nothing
on the other side and isn’t that god enough.

 

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series competition. Her debut novel, Salt Houses, was published in 2017 and was the winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her second novel, The Arsonists’ City, was recently published. Hala lives in Brooklyn with her husband and dog.

[Purchase Issue 22 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Self-Portrait as My Mother

Related Posts

whale sculpture on white background

September 2025 Poetry Feature: Earth Water Fire Poems, a Conversation

LISA ASAGI
"We and the whales, / and everyone else, / sleep and wake in bodies / that have a bit of everything / that has ever lived. Forests, oceans, / horse shoe crabs, horses, / orange trees in countless of glasses of juice, / lichen that once grew / on the cliffsides of our ancestors, / deepseated rhizomes, and stars. // Even stars are made

Hitting a Wall and Making a Door: A Conversation between Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta

DIANE MEHTA and PHILLIS LEVIN
This conversation took place over the course of weeks—over daily phone calls and long emails, meals when they were in the same place, and a weekend in the Connecticut countryside. The poets share what they draw from each other’s work, and the work of others, exploring the pleasures of language, geometric movement, and formal constraint.

Anna Malihot and Olena Jenning's headshots

August 2025 Poetry Feature: Anna Malihon, translated by Olena Jennings

ANNA MALIHON
The girl with a bullet in her stomach / runs across the highway to the forest / runs without saying goodbye / through the news, the noble mold of lofty speeches / through history, geography, / curfew, a day, a century / She is so young that the wind carries / her over the long boulevard between bridges