North
North, on the repaved highway
and dark grey with freshly-painted lines
rhrough the cornfields of my childhood
Over the bodies of water; a chain of them,
connected to fool you into believing that if
you just keep swimming
you’ll escape
When I was small, I had to be warned daily
not to test the ice
You’ll die, they said. Sure as anything, you’ll fall through
be pulled under
Wash up in the spring with a blue face
your eyeballs eaten by fish
And it’s all I could imagine, the day my grandfather took me out
to carve holes in the ice
and sit in a little hut, holding our fishing poles.
I remember hovering over that perfect cylinder,
staring into the black water, moving my face toward it,
asking, would the fish really eat my eyeballs, and what about my eyelashes, those too?
And Nagypapa, pulling me up by the hood of my coat,
furious.
We did it to fit in. It never worked.
Even in the hot summer, nothing here was ever warm.
Those people do not embrace one another
with their whole bodies,
they do not exclaim their joy
or laugh too loudly in the street.
They do not weep openly
or touch each other’s faces
And I once heard them say of me: She is always
close
to spilling.
My people crawled across an ocean to get here,
arrived drenched with salt water,
carrying nothing but a few pieces of
embroidered cloth
and a tambourine
Built houses, but made no homes
and made walls around our moving,
shifting fortresses:
They can never love you, I was told.
You look like them. But you do not move like them.
Now I am a thief, collecting stories and habits
that do not belong to me,
attempting to mimic movements,
to be less Like This.
I was Born Here, after all. I ought to be better at this than my parents.
I stand, hands pressed into my sternum, staring at the lake
inhaling the wet air, wondering if the only place
I ever lived
was the water
my family’s history, suspended, hovering over the Atlantic:
You can never go home.
You can never go home
when you are not from anywhere.
This is why, my mother tells me, I attach myself
fiercely to each new place
and leave just as fiercely
Because Home is a mythical beast
or a folktale
Something I’ve read about in books
Something I’ve borrowed
and begged stories of friends and strangers
from across kitchen tables
with my childish wide eyes
eating up every nuance
so hungry: Tell me everything
while I balance here
so close to spilling
