miscarriage
Word count: 257
Paragraphs: 3
what carries you: a rush of teeth nested scorpions
I am empty
this when I wake before down
this as the light pinches through the windows
hold your arms out & you can
cradle anything
I’m in the ring I am telling him it won’t be February
forever
see:
if you’re not careful you’ll be comforting him before you know it
googling photographs of Mexican desert
like this I cradle
like this I mother the unmothered a stopped clock
when I wake from the anesthesia I ask good?
and mean
I need to brush her hair can I go now please her hair
the highway back home is foggy and I mean
empty
it is good to be empty a jug a bowl
it is good to be a color in the morning
the jade plant turns violet
I turn away from the window
in my own hands I bloom and the blooming is empty:
a quarter moon past its prime a wet I wipe from my jawline
this body
this address of muscles and palpitate
I’m a polite houseguest:
I rinse out my cup when I’m through with it
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and her second novel, The Arsonist’s City, was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.