The train announcement says mind the gap
and I think of my mother's mouth
forming English words like stones
she's learned to swallow.

In Tokyo, the convenience store clerk
bows to my foreign face, speaks
slow careful Japanese—
I answer in the language of my dreams
and watch her eyes recalibrate.

There's a word in every language
for the way light falls through glass at 4pm
but none of them are the same light.

My passport says I belong everywhere.
My body knows better.

It keeps time in two zones simultaneously,
wakes at 3am to phantom commutes,
craves rice for breakfast,
tea the way my grandmother made it—
which grandmother, it doesn't specify.

*

I translate love poems for a living.
Move them from one alphabet to another
like furniture between apartments.

Some words refuse the journey.
Natsukashii—that ache for a past
that may never have been yours.
English makes me say it in twelve words,
and still I've lost the weight of it,
the way it sits in your chest like humidity.

In the supermarket, I reach for things
with no name in the other language.
Umeboshi. Marmite.
These small sour anchors.

At parties, someone always asks
where I'm really from,
and I want to say: from the space
between your question and my answer,
from the breath before I choose
which voice to use.

I live in the hyphen.
It's narrow, but it's mine.

#poetry #identity #language #belonging