Where Every Stranger Is My Father
17 August 2026
O bird of night. You have found me digging into the soil
Of time for my lover’s voice, the way my mother searches
The void for my father’s face, his scent leaving the
Room before her nose finds him
Like my lover, fleeing the rooms in my eyes
Where I keep all my dead alive
My mother stands before the mirror
massaging her bloated belly, smiling as she eases into my father’s arm
My father spins her around gently and
Bends to speak to the belly,
Be a strong boy for me and your mother, while I am away. Don’t stress her o.
My father says planting a kiss on her navel
Her belly jiggles and they laugh as If I heard him.
As if my feeble heart was built to understand the language of war, of erasure
But he never came home, even though the war had ended
And I carried my mother’s wails across the sea
Into countries, where every stranger is my father
Once, a man I had met in Munich, suggested I see a therapist
Don’t wait till the darkness drowns you, he said, slipping away from the bed,
into his shorts. But I could not stop thinking how he could be my father
How each lover could be holes drilled into walls
Waiting to be filled with portraits of a father and his son holding hands, laughing
How my mother cried on days when I returned from school
Her hands clenching the bleached photograph of the stranger that was my father
O bird of night. Teach my hands to hold the harp without shuddering
I want to carry my dead as songs, soaking the city in light.