I Do Not Want to Say This Country Is Not My Home

To feel the mouth with the tongue

                         is not enough

to shape the correct word.                    My mother taught me

                                               a tongue is not full of its own history—

                                               it is its own history. Perfume, she says

                                                       when she means cologne. Behind the word is

what is.              When Mother says,

              sing the guitar, I know she means an instrument

                                               is like your own flesh and bone.

                            (Is it really enough to hear

                                  what she does not say?) My mother showed me history

is a stray dog. It survives

                no matter how little we feed it.

———

This [     ] has an affinity

                 for deletion.

———

Deletion is a white man in this poem.

A white man

                        in belted  jeans (a heavy brass plate of armor on his navel)

                        in pressed buttoned-up shirt (hiding, no doubt, scars of the heart)

                        in leather boots (not made to run in, but to run [      ] in)

                        who told Mother to learn English. Learn English you damn foreigner,

                                                         he said when she asked what perfume he wore.

Learn English, he said as if there could exist no space,

            no world,

                        between worlds.

———

I ask the world this country a question—

            Do writers die by suicide more often than others?

                       Yes.

And another—

             Do refugees die by suicide more often than others?

                      Yes.

                                       —Why?

                                                      Why am I surprised

                                                       to see what I already know?

———

There is a certain kind of death

           that connects my mother to one country

           and this one. A death

                                        long and rickety—

                                        a misshapen bridge over the longest river imaginable.

And unlike god, on a damp plank full of rain and rot,

              I was born.

Writer—             a connector of worlds, the living rope between the current

                           physical word and every possible world, if the rope severs,

                           the universe collapses.

Refugee—          a connector of worlds, the living rope between the current

                          physical word and every possible world, if the rope severs,

                          the universe collapses.

———

The night Mother sang the guitar

              across the open field of her country,

              comrades laughed.

              She knew she would die.

———

On the bridge Mother and I sleep and eat

              all variety of birds

              who fly so stupidly into our traps. Yes,

I would hurt a fly. (It’s in my blood.)

I would hurt a [     ]. I would hurt.

               I would.

               I hurt.

———

Yet no matter how the tongue

               and teeth and lips and cheeks and jaw form sound,

               my mother and I

can only believe

                           we understand each other.

———

We eat a pigeon or a gray dove.

               We wring its neck. Is it merciful

                           to kill a creature before it realizes it is dying?

Still.

                We lick bones

                          and feel glad we aren’t yet stripped

                          of flesh. Mother, your face is as beautiful

as a bird’s feathers.

             Understand me—

                                          understand me when I say

                                                                                   we’ll die.

We’ll die on this bridge.

———

It won’t be death. No,

not death,

                            but a sharp fade. We’ll flicker—

                            a black hole in the eye

of  god’s pupil.

———

Buni knew how to preserve life

              long after it went.

                          Jars of cabbage, red apples

                          still crisp years after tree pluck, innards of beasts

                          whose throats she split open

              like peaches               in the middle of  the night.

                         Mother,

                         she knew

                         when you left,

                         your life would never be saved.

Your mother never said, vino acasă. She knew the old place was not your home. You knew,

       though you were in a country rotting

       behind plexiglass windows, behind a styrofoam door,

                     your hope too sweet, too big to swallow.

       Your hope pulled on like ill-fitting jeans.

———

Yet home is not the body content as is.

               Home is not the tongue’s act against deletion.

It is a language

                in your own blood,

                a language only you can understand.