To feel so lost and be so certain that it’s because your home is calling to you, to be from somewhere else and leave long enough to not understand that place anymore, that is the migration.I came home last week to find that the call vibrating in my bones is not calling me to this… Continue reading On the migration
Tag: jordan
Five Days in Jordan
My family is unmovable, and coming home shows that it is my people that are their own force. I hadn’t realized how much of myself I’d forgotten by taking my family for granted, and to be completely honest I hadn’t realized the full extent of which I was taking those people for granted.Amman teems with… Continue reading Five Days in Jordan
The Jordan that Makes Me Beat
Heading home in the winter and in my veins there is a singing in the same familiarity that confuses you when your dog knows the car is almost home; I never understood that instinctual compass that made them whine and wiggle and physically not be able to contain their joy at where they’re headed until… Continue reading The Jordan that Makes Me Beat
On interrupting
When I was 11 my mother moved us to Jordan for a year, where she enrolled me in private school and allowed my teachers to fail me as long as they also helped me learn to read and write in Arabic. She spent every spare moment trying to enrich my experience in a place I… Continue reading On interrupting
on the royal jordanian, new york to amman
the plane lands in fields arid and emptyred in the south, and everywhere dusty, and the dead sea holds its breath, bellows under Pangaea’s plates,welcomes me home again. with every landing my stomach braced,dusty nostalgia revisited,my silly hope misplaced: the fields forget me, and I forget to forgive it,assuming always that my land also sought… Continue reading on the royal jordanian, new york to amman
on stone
my mother thriving,my father now dusty bones,my parents are like my countriesand I am the land between the deserts and the prairies.America and my home Kingdom,they are nothing alike.Like my parents, they are divided by simple things, small ideas,that still keep them worlds apart.my worlds, my parents, both are wrought with ancient passions and dust,nothing… Continue reading on stone
on tradition
to acknowledge nowwhat i never knew i didn’t know then,to remember your lonelinessin the midst of my history(unbroken, thriving, culturally relative)is to say to myself youyou and every tradition you had,you were wrong.and there is never any going back
Jordan calls to my bones In throbs of Bedouin drumbeats, Saying: here your heart is home. Like the muds of the dead sea, I have fermented in my history, And it sits heavily upon me sealing and healing my cuts and scrapes with stinging mystery. In the lights of Amman And the fields of Shatana… Continue reading
On migration
There is something to be said for the initial impressions on the young: Maybe I am stuck in this mindset because of when I met you,when I knew you,when I loved and had you.My bones were still soft, allowing perfect harmony in the tug of you and the give, the bend of me.It is an… Continue reading On migration
Garbanzo Bae 