languages flow
like rivers,
their currents tugging
at my bones.

i don’t speak them.
i sway,
letting the tide
teach me the rhythm.

i spent last night
with a fever,
burning my skin
like wildfire
consuming a forest.

when the heat settled
just above thirty-seven,
my mind brought forward
the cyrillic alphabet.

my mum taught me —
people are always surprised
she doesn’t speak english.
she grew up in the sixties,
where the syllabus
included russian and latin.

when i was barely six,
we translated the names
of pin-up girls
on cigarette packets.

german came at ten,
english at fifteen.
in boarding school,
i helped a classmate
with french
until he grew annoyed
that i was,
apparently,
effortlessly clever.

italian arrived
through a video game
and now i wonder
how someone
who repeated a grade,
could, without panic,
tear through russian today.

i think i have
my hungarian heritage
to thank.
i don’t stumble
at endless suffix chains,
i match the signs,
ears tuned to every case.
i feel the meaning
of what isn’t said,
map the languages
and treat them like quests
as i search for structure
and logic in them.

so, when the patterns
grab me by my shoulders,
still feverish, still dancing,
i just follow the steps.

running my senses across
an alphabet so covered in moss
once beating now at pause
faint thundering applause

familiar friendship now foreign
white planes edge-to-edge-barren
a daunting feat to start again
to fill it with ink right from my pen

the rhymes and I are now estranged
though nothing every really changed
is it my fingers or my mind deranged
this line i now cannot arrange

Our nature to keep

our world safe makes us afraid --


of foreign people.

They say home is where the heart is.  
How poetic. How sweet.  
How utterly useless when you wake up in a bed that smells like someone else’s city,  
when the walls don’t know your voice,  
when the streets spit out syllables that trip your tongue.  

Tell me—does this look like home to you?  
A place where I walk like a stranger in my own shoes,  
where my laughter is softer, measured,  
where even my silence doesn’t sound quite right?  
I sit in a room filled with my own things,  
but they feel stolen, out of place,  
as if I’ve broken into a life that wasn’t meant for me.  

They smile at me, they nod, they talk.  
So kind. So welcoming.  
So oblivious to the weight I carry  
when I pretend that their way of life is now mine.  
Like it’s just that easy.  
Like you can simply unzip yourself from the past  
and slide into a new skin without bleeding.  

Back home—  
(ha, “home,” like it’s still mine to claim)  
the air was warmer,  
the sky softer,  
the ground held me like I belonged.  
Here, I am tolerated.  
Accepted, even.  
But belonging?  
That’s a different kind of luxury.  

So I go through the motions.  
I drink their coffee. I learn their roads.  
I adjust my mouth to their words,  
wear them like second-hand clothes,  
a little tight, a little loose, never quite fitting.  
And I tell myself, maybe one day,  
this place will stop feeling borrowed.  

Maybe one day, I’ll wake up  
and the walls will know my name.  

But not today.  
Not yet.  
Maybe never.

"Loosing weight is weird" I think as I stare at my naked body in the bathroom mirror.
I don't feel how I thought I would. My anticipated joy had turned to relief, a burden I no longer had to bear.
My soul has always been chaotic-always waging wars against itself, so of course this too would bring conflict.
The clothes that clung snug to my skin are now too baggy. Clothes I finally felt confident after years of searching for what worked, what didn't, what was flattering, what wasn't.
And now I'm looking up how to shrink everything
And my ******* aren't as full..
sloping and drooping down without being rounded by fat;
like tissues stuffed in a bra that's just slightly too big.
Not to sound ungrateful, because I love this new body (it's an answer to prayer really; taking away the edge of my insecurities) but I suppose it feels a little foreign.
Like a best friends house you practically grew up in: completely memorized in its familiarity; marked by memories, a home away from home, but still not the place you called "home".
And I spent so long learning how to love this body; accepting her flaws, her imperfections, but never quite convincing myself, only to have to relearn again.
And in some ways that makes me...sad?
I don't have another word for it.
Maybe it's a grieving, for the part of me that was a part of me for so long; a part I scolded and criticized.
And I hate myself at times.
Because I was my own bully-projecting my insecurities with verbal lashings.
All because I had this idea that if I was prettier, skinnier, I would feel more wanted and less alone...that it was the missing piece to my happiness.
And the assumed projections of strangers thoughts bombarded me into thinking there was truth in those hauntings,
because somewhere down the line, at an unknown moment in my subconscious, beauty became abundant.
I should get used to this changing skin, because life and age will always be forcing it to keep up, to adapt; It will continue to expand and sag and wrinkle and crease.
And I hope I can learn to love those foreign bodies too, though not so unfamiliar....
                           just unplaced.

3 years
I find a new place
3 years
I wear a new face
3 years
I carry my shame
3 years
I burden my brain

Am I the variable, or a constant in march
It's never too bright and it's never too dark
A rolling snowball or a forest in fire
Border planted flags do not inspire