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.