Displacement

My mother left her mother,

two sisters, a father

and my father left his childhood home and they took me with them but I felt no loss because I hadn’t had the chance to fall in love with the country that gave me this skin and blood.

From two suitcases, my parents built a home. They never thought they would stay but now their daughters don’t speak the same language.

Of my mother tongue I only can grasp phrases,

linguistically orphaned, culturally converted,

struggling to yank out the roots of words that should have been written into my spine. I grew up on a fault line.

And yet, when the earth beneath me starts to shake, I look up, and wonder:

Am I the same as them?