Home

Home is a room you can rearrange, a desk you shuffle and drag toward a window and away. Sunlight streaming in is home. Bathing in it. At night: floor lamps, year-round warm-white fairy-lights. Home.

You cringe at the thought of buying sterile dirt for your Whole Foods Portuguese kale seeds. But must ants, weeds and snails share home?

Home is a silent film in which your body is a dark continent, your skin unpeopled. These are rooms you try to shrink and barricade. A sign says "animals needn't consent to photography."

Home—a room the living and dead occupy equally, names crammed floor to ceiling. So too the languages of your kin, spoken and danced. Threshold: the hope that their magic means no harm, is not demonic.

Lies you spin to stay in this country, you are molding them into home.

And Mom's pineapple crumble, the stuffed chicken she made for Daddy's birthday when you were seven, sugar in French toast—that lover's name: home. Home,

a day walking in Vancouver's sun. Happen upon home as a coffee shop's signboard where someone has written "#BlackLivesMatter."

Forget the terrors of being a woman at home; learn them. Ignore the colony; remember how you sometimes colonize.

Home is a weight against your body, home the weight of your body. Home, edema in your right foot when you've been in the air too long. Sink back to earth.

Home, a dream you are always trying to re-enter.