Two Poems - Alyan

 

 

Talal Alyan

HANOI, 1009

white pines, the cinema of old

dreams, or just panic in a new dark, 

arching some small part of you, 

for what you can’t remember, rather

you can’t remember for what 

this dead mud used to rise,

babbling kerosene back into the sky,

and you’ve grown weary of this,

haven’t you? let yourself sit quietly.

chart a map of all the streetlamps,

sodium lights, this honest astronomy, 

picture the steel melded over its 

own body, asphalt like a river, no flower,

no pines, dreaming only of little 

things like the weather, like the weather

rushing towards you, then past you,

then away


   


CHICAGO, 927 B.C.


waiting for red searchlights to circle across, 

and all of the moss to climb the skyline, waiting 

in railroad stations, nearly feral with surrender, for the 

hi-lo sirens to cross and dot the arrow of the night,

bark, fountain grass

suspended in plumes 

here is the geography of the disappeared:

sparks drifting towards no color, outward into a dull quiet. 

like this, like ferrotype, like

sifting through earth

waiting for noise


Talal Alyan is a Palestinian-American writer based in New York. His debut collection of poetry, Babeldom, was published by Astrophil Press in 2019.