This week's piece is a poem I wrote about a year and so ago, while I was trying to navigate endless calls and steps in immigration procedures. I had just come off a call with the immigration office, and instead of feeling frustration with how constricted I felt by something like an expired passport, thought about how there's freedom in loving where you are from, even when it feels like sometimes you'd rather hate it.

Bloodline

The soil. Earth. Origin. Muddied, brown, a lineage,

ancestry, the roots shaped like veins running through

the body, except this time it is a generational body, a

collection of vessels that walk be home. Every time, they walk me

home,

I walk every path and find the smell of my

grandmother’s perfume, the burnt smell of cornflour,

the smoke rising from the earth, the fields my

grandfather nursed by killing his ties to his sister,

another vessel, silence deafens us when his lungs give up.

Blood. Is thicker than water thicker than the cover of a passport

thicker than the static when I am calling,

calling, calling the immigration office and yet I see my blood,

the same blood that I bleed every month, the same blood my mother spilled

on the hospital floor linoleum bright white floors when I came out of her, and I

screamed and cried and made a new vessel in our

familial body, this body I inherited, it was given to me,

soil.

I am in the mountains now, and it

is 

the space I belong to, the blood that we spill,

the highways are our veins, come stay for a while, there is darkness but there is also

light

the soil. Earth. My origin is my mother and my father

and every bloodline that came before me, my great great grandfather

was a military man, he came to our land and made it his, blood is what came when his son

was born, whose son bore the bloodline, his wife carried my grandfather,

there was vastness, heat, soil,

they don’t understand this at the immigration office, their systems do not think of blood. Soil. Origin.

They ask me for a passport number, they don’t know, it is no longer what can define me, only blood,

I will come from this soil and to this soil I will return, so will my lineage, I am valleys and mountains,

the love found in Venezuela by a Frenchman I am the Colombian mother who bore my grandfather I am the man who met my mother from the Andes mountains

so I am the mountain. 

My blood runs a lineage bigger than 6 digits could ever allow,

where I am

My blood. Origin. Earth. Is only immensity. The receiver line at the immigration center cuts off

my bloodline never does.