Photo credit: Rachel de Cordova

Hayan Charara is the author of three poetry collections—The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose 2001); The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon 2006), nominated for the National Book Award; and Something Sinister (Carnegie Mellon 2016). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is the editor of Inclined to Speak (University of Arkansas, 2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. He lives in Texas.

Copyright © 2015 by Hayan Charara. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 20, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.