There are children who know the sounds of bombs better than their own laughter. They carry the memories of home in their torn up pockets, memories that might not fit again.
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I never thought I’d leave. Grant Street wasn’t just a road with a name slapped on a sign; it was a piece of me, a place that shaped who I was before I even realized it. The brick sidewalk, worn and uneven, carried the weight of my childhood.
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For as long as I can remember, I have lived as two people. One wears sneakers and speaks quickly in English, laughing too loudly in hallways and blending into classrooms. During lunch, she quietly throws away the idli and chutney her mom packed and trades for a slice of pizza or peanut butter sandwich so she doesn’t have to explain the smell.
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Two doors sat side by side on the row of houses, pale and sun-stained, with curved arches and little balconies of black iron that made them look almost like they belonged somewhere far away. Not in this noisy America.
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5 hours a day,
5 days a week,
I stand in front of a mirror.
Studio lights buzzing,
cold marley under my bare feet,
glass waiting
like a judge who never blinks.
break
the lake's surface
and I enter an underwater world.
Oh God, forgive the boy I used to be, the one who confused disobedience with liberty. The one who believed that the noise of his own confusion could be drowned in smoke and alcohol. I can still clearly recall that boy: fifteen, lost in a loving but insensitive home, and furious for reasons he could not identify.
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I scramble to get as many things as I can into the box in front of me. The last box. They’re stacked against my wall, pushed next to each other in rows. There’s about five of them.
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She sits and waits, while on her plate sits strong, delicious mustard.
He sits and knows her hunger grows; says he, “Just eat the mustard.”
While she waits, while hungry, says, “If you think that you know best, then come and eat my mustard.”
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Dear Girl Reading Under the Lamp,
I am ever curious for you to turn the page and find a secret, an invitation, a whisper that carries music in the autumn wind. Your dreams are glittering, tenuous spiders’ threads.
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Today I saw your smile in the sunset
Blooming over the snow you
Wouldn't call home.
My house normally wakes up around 5:30 am.
I don't mean it actually opens its eyes,
but it starts to come to life.
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In the beginning, there was darkness, and a bitter cold that would bite your tongue and gnaw on it. There was no light; there was no happiness, nor was there any scrap or piece of food to be spared. It was full of hatred and despair. Evil spirits filled the air. But in the dusk of it all, there was a boy called Hope.
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Whatever life came before now, it seems to be only a series of blurred edges, constantly shifting memories, and an inability to know whether the words I think I’ve heard and the words I feel I’ve spoken have been a truth or rather a made-up image I’ve convinced myself of.
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To love a country as if you’ve lost one:
2009, my mother left Angola
with sand in her shoes,
three children clinging like shadows to her skirt.
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