Fixation

By HALA ALYAN

 

It’s like knowing there’s
a house on fire and only
you  have  the  key,  but
there’s  no  address,  the
streets   keep   changing
numbers,   and   if   you
don’t  make  it  in  time,
everybody   inside   dies.
Even   the   houseplants.
You  never  make  it  in
time.    I still   like   my
brain.    This    feels   as
impossible   as    crown
shyness, but it’s true—I
feel  its  lure flash like a
camera bulb sometimes,
the magic  and the grief
like two  rivers  necking
where they meet.

 

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series competition. Her debut novel, Salt Houses, was published in 2017 and was the winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her second novel, The Arsonists’ City, was recently published. Hala lives in Brooklyn with her husband and dog.

[Purchase Issue 22 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Fixation

Related Posts

Close-up of a field of rye

April 2026 Poetry Feature #1: Carson Wolfe, Benjamin Paloff, and Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
For years, I’ve been drafting a book / about trauma, how words may form / a likeness of the mind that’s torn— / the past tears easily as paper, I write. / And don’t the leaves on the ground / resemble ripped poems, as if the weather / keeps trying to find the right phrase, / all those crumpled revisions of the seasons.

Black and white portrait of a man wearing spectacles.

They Could Have

CONSTANTINE CONTOGENIS
Near destitute, I’m this close to homeless. / This killer of a city, Antioch, / it’s eaten all the money I have, / this killer and its cost of living. // But I’m young, in the best health. / I speak a marvelous Greek / (and I know, I mean “know,” my Aristotle, Plato, / the orators, poets, the—well, you name them).

March 2026 Poetry Feature: Welcome Back Peter Filkins

PETER FILKINS
pissarro is dead cézanne too / swept away like willowed flotsam / that brute degas gone as well / chafing tides the sea of years // long ago battles fought discarded / ballast tossed from fame’s balloon / rising like heat and the unheard prices / feeding straw to the fires of need // for more garden cuttings variants