We argue how to say where we’re
going. Home

is the only translation
I can accept. She counters that the word

I use, transliterated, is Country.
I hear your words in my own That way of thinking

is how we survived
the British and the French and the others before them

and since them a list long and knotted.
Though she distrusts nations, she concedes my word

is how we might yet survive.

She’s always teasing me about the signatures of an
empire in my pronunciation.

I’m waiting for her to notice
the younger one speaking through her.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first full-length collection of poems, Water & Salt (Red Hen) won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, (Two Sylvias Prize, 2016), and Letters from the Interior (Diode Editions, 2019).

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