Through the window of the place we’ve made home for a month, harbor mocks the eyes. A proxy for the one we normally live beside.

Pickled chilies in the fridge, raisins desiccated from your grandfather’s garden. The extravagance of family and its scatterings, as if cards shuffled back and forth through a deck.

Traffic’s low-grade conversation. Azan rising through electrical lines. The chatter of cobblestones beneath feet. And the hedonistic pleasure of being soaked in your family’s syllables, still viscous to me.

Is it only new cities that can excavate old feelings, or also families?

Mid-morning sky pink as the fish flesh you forked apart last night. A stray dog sniffing time evaporating from concrete.

For some, a later sunrise means longer hours to remain pitted against night’s hard pulp. For others: to lie spiraled beside the inner animal.

Here in this café, the pace of translation is that of slowed nodes. And yet language is not rain’s linear pins. Its thrill can hit before lightning does—its delight.

Mosque dome cradled by a church’s striated arms. Mobile phone shop in the ruins of a hammam. The inquisitive eyes of olives, shopped in from both sides of the strait. The constant reminder of imported force. 

Sometimes I wonder if belonging is to be approached gently, as if an abandoned thing.

And yet, evidence of the collective: tiny brown pellets left for tabby streaks at the edge of sight. The rods of fishermen, thin as eyelashes, undulating in a single wink.

Tonight, your family’s gossip, sopped in pots of hypnotic tea—And this comfort coating the throat like an old remedy—

Lines on a cat’s face erased by the end of evening’s pencil. Let us agree that night is the borderless place!

Despite your mother’s weeping, I am grateful to dictators, for they brought you to me.

This trip will end, but don’t worry my love. The starch of family is thickest in its cooking, but its bonds will maintain the matrix.

Perhaps approximate is all home can ever be.