Hala Alyan

It's beautiful to speak for her; she's dead.
I sit in the scalding bath. I like to change my skin.

This is my sanity: salt and bubbles. To outlive
is to become mockingbird: She was, she was.

I echo her in the water, and in this way I live too,
walking at 2 A.M. in a village in Lebanon,

jackals waiting in the blank land. It is 1959.
Jiddo has a revolver in his pocket, to shoot

whatever might slink from the dark, but nothing does.
Only howls. They sing to keep the animals away.

I like to think she wore her hair in a knot,
high as a planet, that she only loosened it inside,

back in the new house. They barely knew the country.
The walk was over. The walk was forgotten about.

Only I am obsessed with it, stage-directing their lives
like the stranger that I am. It's all gone now: house, body.

What remains is no better than gossip:
animals, a fog that took days to leave her hair.
from the journal SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
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"Secrets, Omissions, the Unknown: On Victoria Chang's 'Dear Memory'"

"Though Chang's memoir is written in letters, attaching itself to a plot with only the most delicate threads, what emerges is a picture of a woman searching for a way to use words and tangible forms to observe and reshape the world. The development of Chang's literary philosophy is as important to her as how she views her parents or her memories of past relationships. Dear Memory is ontology as much as it is ontogeny."

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