All of them, who clutched their pocketbooks, who hid the money
for the light bill in the Bible, who counted, counted, and recounted

stacks of towels. For our grandmothers who stored the white wax
of bacon grease in a coffee can, who tossed table salt over their shoulders,

who had rules about stepping under ladders, eating supper's last
biscuit, and the acceptable distance hemmed up from a girl's knee.

For our grandmothers who would not let us call her grandmother, who wanted
to be called anything but grandma, for they were too young to be a mother

when they became mothers, and then? You.

For our grandmothers who made us pick our own switch, who cooled
hot coffee on a saucer, then sipped from its chipped edge.

For our grandmothers who would not call a cicada a cicada but a locust,
a thirteen-year plague of them, making an apocalypse of June, for grandmothers who

considered a tabby not a cat but a tail-switch hex that would slip under your bedroom door,
take your breath from you, then smother the baby in its sleep.

For our grandmothers who taught there's a right way and a wrong way-
right is right, wrong's wrong-ain't no sense in between. For grandmothers

who emptied their husband's fish-gut buckets and bore enough children to run
out of names. For my grandmother, who snatched me from the nurse and wrapped me

in her tea-length mink coat. It was cold, almost spring, and though I was bruise yellow
with jaundice, she took us out of that hospital, settling her youngest daughter,

a teenage mother, careful in the back. With no shoulder belts or infant seats or air bags,
it was simple: she held me up front for my first ride, she turned the key.

We were on our way, she took us
on home.

Often, I imagine the county scoured almost entirely of us,
struck by some subjective siege that strips all the human stuff
save for the calcified pump handles of old diesel tanks
and solder-warted handrails leading down
to baptizing holes and any cockeyed tombstone with a date before 1928.

My stomach feels like a place someone tried to smother a fire and I’m just so tired
of looking at it all.

Once, a winged something scraped its body across my teeth
and slammed down the back of my throat and pounded at the wet hallway of my esophagus
like it was my fault.

Sometimes I forget what language I speak until someone begins to sing and my tongue twitches and pitches in all on its own and then I think, Oh. Yeah.
Yeah, meteoroids slam melodies from Saturn’s rings, and yeah, zebra finches rehearse
their canticles while sleeping, and yeah, prehistoric man squatted
over the corpse of a griffon vulture and carved from a hollow wing
the first known flute, sent breath into bone and ferried up song into a sky
similar to this one.

When my neighbor stacked a half-dozen beagle hounds in chicken cages,
they lipped the wiring and recited Ecclesiastes and ululated until the tree limbs snapped.
I didn’t call the cops--I was afraid someone would burn my house down.

His family was known for things like that.
Think of the hills huddled around a great compost pile of us, how the seraphim could hunch down and dry their wings against the heat of our heap. Holy, holy, holy.

Pardon me while I reassemble my dead,
flip a can of nails into the river, and pretend my grandfather is a wild angel
kicking up shine where rust meets water.
It won’t be long now,
fingers crossed.

Soon, I will gird myself in feathers and ash,
crowned with the bones of a once-voiceless bird
now shaken with song.

My body keeps its own maps
and I know the way home.

The rest of you better get
while the gettin’s good.

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. Allah Ceebta, I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can't afford to forget.
*
They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies shot in the face for trying to enter, the Gulf of Aden bloated with immigrant bodies. I wouldn’t have put my children on the boat unless I thought the sea was safer than the land. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running and running. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with brown bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on my face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck, I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.
*
I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.
*
I hear them say, go home, I hear them say, fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second and the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I'll see you on the other side.

We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird’s target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts

from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.

In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover,
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons

crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,

till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk

wrestling iron through grass.
We weren’t there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,

ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man’s eyelid.