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I. Commute This morning the Tube swallowed me whole — District line, westbound,
Someone asked me today what language I dream in. I said: both, and neither, and they nodded like...
On the Yamanote Line, 11 p.m., I count the stations by their sound— Yūrakuchō, Shimbashi,...
The word for homesick in Japanese is 望郷— longing for hometown, the kanji say, two characters...
Someone asks me where I'm from and I say the Piccadilly Line between Earl's Court and Hammersmith,
I wake to my mother's voice on the phone,
her Japanese smooth as silk over distance.
Genki? she asks, and I answer in English—
yes, I'm fine—because the word for fine
doesn't translate, not really, when you're standing
in a London kitchen at 6 a.m., alone,
watching steam rise from your tea
like all the things you can't say
in either language.
---
There's a woman on the Central line
reading Murakami in English.
I wonder if she knows the Japanese
sounds nothing like this—
the sentences shorter, the silences
different. I want to tell her
translation is a kind of haunting,
that we carry the ghost of one language
into the body of another.
But she turns the page,
and I say nothing,
because I'm fluent in not speaking, too.
---
In Tokyo, my grandmother's hands
fold paper into cranes, each crease
a prayer she doesn't name.
She doesn't ask why I left,
why I live so far away.
Instead, she teaches me the word natsukashii—
nostalgia, but not quite.
A longing for something
that never fully belonged to you.
---
Tonight, I text you in English
because Japanese feels too close,
too true. I miss you, I write,
and the screen glows between us,
neither here nor there,
just light suspended in the dark.
#poetry #bilingual #identity #displacement
