BY BAZEED

Farangiz Yusupova, *Interior Exterior*, laser woodcut print, 15 x 22 inches, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Thus Spake Hala Alyan

BAZEED | APR 2022 | ISSUE 15

as told in The Twenty-Ninth Year

Have you heard the one about never going home again?
God forbid, God forbid.
And how sometimes you need one knife to carve another.

Those cardboard boxes, how they opened faithfully for you, little brown hearts, how they carried everything you would ask of them.

First shooting
star. First silverfish. First carrot.

*

The wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard.
Oh, the tyranny! Of a wind falling in love with itself.*
Sometimes what’s left of a good house is its locked door
& the windows are not windows at all.
In this land of American shrapnel and strip clubs†
I’ve circled entire houses just to see my mother’s cheek on my father’s shoulder.

Through the windows of finer houses
one built with wind, one with color, the third with brick
I saw lives trudging like bison toward the thaw.
Like a lighthouse during a nor’easter, theirs was a love filled with static.
The heart spoils the body and the body spoils the air. The refugees ate water, the president apologized.
One mistake becomes three.

There is rage in the whistling kettle.
My name waits like an obedient clock.
You might say this is about exile, mountains eroded by
six hundred years of feet.‡

*

In this land of American shrapnel,
dreamcatcher of teeth and turquoise,
we stop to watch the buzzards.
The best house in the city is the one filled with
seven million years of dead mornings,
the best house in the city is the one filled with
the lovers of gasoline. It wasn’t my Eden. I forgot to water the flowers.

To keep the world spinning
we predict our fortune for the coming years:
whatever quiet is the one we can bear.

I’d like a starless night.
Moon that wants nothing of you.
Gospel: Insomnia—
Gospel: Diaspora—
Heirloom, ordinary scripture.
Museum of magnolias & husks &
fog as home. Chimes to announce the wind.
Cars that steer back the way they came.

*

In this land of American shrapnel
Everything haunts.

I point out the dead things I found in the night sky.
I keep the seventeen houses.
I keep the baby teeth.

In this land of American shrapnel
Everything haunts &
the worst ghosts are the ones that don’t come back.

If I forget Arabic, how a wound like that over a decade becomes a kind of heart
then extinct is my grandmother, her lentil soup,
the photographs water-mottled, on the back الشّام scrawled, and the year.

*

What do we do with heartache?

Look, her name was.
Look, the mortar grows on our houses like moss.

*

When it became clear that America wouldn’t apologize,
under the blackout moon
I asked any god to make me better.
I shook the chain-link fence near the border and gave a false name: Lorelei [origin: German; meaning: alluring enchantress]
بس باب النّجّار مخَلّع
The Carpenter’s door is falling apart.
Patron saint of alcoholism &
disappointment—
I want to spit in His mouth.
Resigned to the nasty animal of me,
now I toast to God. Here’s to the glass crowned in salt!
Here’s to the half-sunk ship!

*

To show me how to make this life
god again,
not a mosque,
my mother taught me how to dance in an empty room.
My mother taught me a tree can’t be killed twice.
My mother taught me to own a thing, you must want it
until it feels more like love than anything else.
My mother taught me full breath before new verse.

When I do dream it’s of octopi
suckers around my finger like an engagement ring.
The animal heart inside the animal chest,
we remake love over and over, like unwed atoms,
into forgery, into need, busying our hands.
The exile knows their bones are 206 instruments.§
My mother taught me there is a song in each one.

What I mean is I tore bread
so the birds would come
kissed them until they spoke again
prayed only that something so beautiful would know that it was.**

And when the sun finally rose,
I believed in a different god
veins blue as hydrangeas.

*

—

* the original reads “the tyranny of a wind falling in love with itself.”

† the original line reads “This is land of American shrapnel and strip clubs.”

‡ the original line reads “mountains eroded by six hundred years of women’s feet”.

§ the original line reads, “The exile knows his bones are 206 instruments.”

** the original line reads, “Pray only that something so beautiful would know that it was.”

A Note on the Text:

This is a cento composed from lines contained in the poems of Hala Alyan’s The Twenty-Ninth Year.
There is a single insertion of a phrase of my own, which appears in square brackets.
Otherwise I allowed myself to insert ampersands where I needed them.
This cento is part of a larger collection in progress entitled “thus spake Zulaïkha,” gathering in centos the work of Arab writers making a home in the diaspora of English.

Bazeed is an Egyptian immigrant, writer, performance artist, stage actor, and cook living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed on stages in the United States and abroad, including Kilo Batra: In Death More Radiant, presented in December 2021 at the Arab American National Museum. Bazeed is currently at work on a book-length erasure poem of the hyper-racist text, The Arab Mind; The Sunshine School Songbook, a solo cabaret sponsored by late-stage capitalism and the algorithms of Gulf Labor dystopias; and the second draft of their so-faggy-it’s-in-the-title! play, faggy faafi Cairo boy.

Farangiz Yusupova is an artist whose work explores ideas of cultural dissonance, home, and memory through painting. Born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Farangiz immigrated to New York with her family in 2014. She holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. In the summer of 2018, Farangiz was awarded a scholarship to attend a workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado. Her work was exhibited in numerous group shows such as at 56 Bogart St, Brooklyn, NY (in affiliation with M. David & Co), Dodomu Gallery and Mi-Sul Virtual Exhibition, and Yonkers Arts Weekend. Farangiz is currently participating in NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program.