Poet Dr. Hala Alyan at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival

She is not only a poet and novelist, but also a clinical psychologist. As she read selections from her most recent poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, Dr. Hala Anyan’s dark eyes flashed; her shock of brown curly hair fluttered in the breeze; and her voice modulated from quiet to powerful. She is a Palestinian-American born in Carbondale, Illinois. But her poems are never far from her ancestral home in a conflicted land.

Even as she read her poems, we heard the loud sounds of a demonstration at the University of Southern California (USC) loudly protesting the horrors of the Israelis’ revenge on the Palestinians. And now we hear that graduation ceremonies at USC have been put on hold during the crisis.

Naturalized

Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim.
I won’t say where he was born. I’ve already said too much.
Look, the gardenias are coming in. Look, my love
is watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites.
He likes to understand. He plays devil’s advocate.
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
It’s so hot under that hospital elevator.
There’s no room for a child’s braid. In the staff meeting,
I stretch my teeth into a country
When they congratulate me on the ceasefire.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a coffin.
They like me when I spit my father from my mouth.
There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth.
I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain.
I break a Klonopin* with my teeth and swim.
The newspaper says truce and C-Mart
is selling peaches again. Woolly in my palms.
I’ve marched on the street too few times.
I’ve ruined the dinner party with my politics.
Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos.
There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed
in thirty minutes flat. I stop jogging when I’m tired.
Nothing can justify why I’m alive. Why there’s still
a June. Why I wake and wake and the earth doesn’t shake.

” Klonopin – Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine. It is approved for the treatment of panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia), as well as certain types of seizure disorders.