Where I’m From (a poem)

Sometimes I wonder how
much geography can fit
in one person. You ask
where I’m from and I
imagine the two sides of
my brain illuminating. 

From far away,  one side looks
like tatreez, Palestinian cross-stitch,
in red, black, and green. 
The Mediterranean Sea churns
into the Atlantic in my thalamus
and the stitches unravel and
reform into sand and highways
and the rolling Appalachians
without ever breaking off. 

If your question is sincere, 
I’ll hand you a magnifying glass
for a closer look. Each little
x is not random, but careful collaborations
forming teen and sabr (fig and cactus fruit),
 laughter and lines of Arabic poetry. 

Scan over the churning water 
to the looser threads on the other
side and there’s so much motion
it’s hard for you to keep up – 

A girl runs through rows
of cucumbers and rose bushes,
making mud pies in a Raleigh backyard.
She heads east, stopping for a piece of 
cornbread in Colerain and pulling
her hat over her ears in a 
deer stand in Windsor. 

You’re looking so intently that
you swear you can smell the
air as it gets saltier. There’s 
a giant carp hanging off her
fishing rod at Lake Mattamuskeet now.
Then, legs swung over a culvert, she’s
slowly pulling up a string with a chicken
leg at the bottom and swiping a net
into brackish water. 

You blink and she’s on the sand
in Kill Devil Hills, a box of whale bones
and skate eggs under her arm for
“research” and then she’s climbing
 stairs that seemed to reach into
the sky in Nags Head. The sand
behind her disappears into marsh
and she jumps out of a kayak 
into a backyard in Wanchese 
just after the mosquito truck left 
a cloud of poison behind. 

She’s a little older and pulls
her shoe laces tight and 
jumps clear to the other end
of the state. You see a flower
box on the porch of an apartment
in Asheville and a Subway apron
tied around her waist. Tire marks
from school to work to home to
study group to volunteer -
too many loops make you dizzy.

And then the strings loosen
once more and she’s splashing
in a cool creek in Swannanoa,
he’s by her side and three sets of footprints 
follow everywhere they go. This entire side 
of the brain has a North Carolina sky -
the kind you see early morning
when it’s mostly just the birds out.
You get the sense that 
one side is what is
and one side is what 
could have been, but
both are threaded together
and equal in influence. 

Diaspora is of the land
and of my mind and
when you ask my name, 
it comes out like: