a new place in this world is home
a poem
where the orange-dust streets are packed down with people motorbikes, rancorous Toyotas, and headless chickens / screaming pastors, open-air kitchens, and love
colliding in a sort of rank symbiosis / I smell delicious sweat and tropical fervor / putrid meats, wicked perturbance, and a semblance of the place that I call home.
those with me don’t recognize it. That a place filled with color could be just like one without it, or that a bus in a white blanket needs to rid itself of saviors.
as we ride through the capital, jarring / bumbling / windows halfway down, enough for them to see our foreheads and point / they yell to their friends, mzungu! mzungu!
my friends are amused, but I feel the well of shame over -flowing. This place stinks of life, and I am hungry. I ask the driver to drop me off. I demand it.
stepping off the bus, I am swarmed by lovers. They touch my shoulders, and I hug them back. In broken English, I ask to be theirs. We watch the bus disappear above the green
hills, and I make myself at home with new peers.
a poem about being dropped in Kampala, Uganda with a bus of American peers/strangers.
Here is Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) ‘s poem original poem for reference.
tagging: Indy Dwyer Christina M. Ward Steve B Howard Christina Hoag Daniel Williams Laurie Perez
