Home > Work > The Twenty-Ninth Year
1 " I've been working on the same joke for years. The punchline is you were happy all along. "
― Hala Alyan , The Twenty-Ninth Year
2 " We inherit everything. Especially questions. "
3 " Marriage is sweeping the floors of a room you're not sure you want to die in. "
4 " In the city bombs peck the streets into a braille that we pretend we cannot read. "
5 " there’s always a dark darker than the dark you know "
6 " I burned his emails / this is not a metaphor "
7 " The Victorians had it right: a woman will be as small / as the world needs her to be. But you already knew that, didn't you. "
8 " You made me up, all heels and mascara. You love the instrument you refuse to play. "
9 " I just loved the idea of a place so old it only knew how to tell the truth. "
10 " The Temperance (XIV) Card“Highway 17 in Texas: we stop to watch buzzardssupping on a roadkill porcupine. The mountains are a Persian rug of emerald and brown, wolfish cloudsgathering rain. The towns stack up like a tarot deck.A row of Mexican women stand at clotheslines,shake the static from dresses. The fortune you believeis the one you'll get. Eres muy sexy, says the wrinkled manat the gas station. Eres divina. The jade cottonwoodsspeak of flooding; the yucca tattle on the south.You might say this about exile, mountains eroded bysix hundred years of women's feet, the heavy pressfrom babies and water buckets. Forty miles south,mothers find their daughters' bodies in boxes.The dusk is a murder of magenta and indigoagainst the black land, as monstrously beautifulas a rape tree. As we drive, a brown woman namesthe dying plants. She reads the cacti like an open palm. "