Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, SALT HOUSES, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017, and is a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

POETRY

Pray Like You Mean It

By HALA ALYAN

look / we all become our worst stories / this is mine / I went
back / for more / nobody made me do that / I just hated being ignored