Atlas of Elsewhere

I. Arrival

The coffee cools at 3 a.m.,

snow claiming streets

whose names resist my tongue.

I practice them alone—

syllables that refuse

my mouth.

Outside, the city sleeps

in a language I’m still learning

to dream in.

II. Documents

They ask my name—

I spell it three times,

watch them write it wrong,

then sign

because correction

feels like risk.

At the checkpoint:

Have you ever joined anything

that might threaten security?

My hand hovers.

I check no.

III. Terminal

The woman beside me:

documents in three languages,

a bare finger

where a ring was.

Her child draws chimneys

that lean the wrong way,

smoke climbing

against memory.

We do not speak.

IV. Returned to Sender

Mail keeps coming

to places I no longer live.

Letters return—

or vanish

into gaps.

I renew the forwarding address

again and again—

as if someone

is still trying to reach me—

the person I was

before I learned

to spell myself differently.

V. Phantom Country

Some nights I wake

without coordinates.

The ceiling is wrong.

The air, wrong.

A siren outside

speaks another grief.

I check what time it is

in a country that has released me

only on paper.

VI. Transplant

I plant my name

in borrowed earth—

mispronounced,

bent on official forms,

but mine.

First shoots push through:

green, uncertain.

Winter waits.

Still, I water them

morning after morning—

new syllables,

learning to take

the shape of my mouth.