walking the seawall. a figure walks toward me
balanced on the gray

boundary, she steps into focus and we cross
parallels, i recognize her from the flight. she mirrors me

our echoing accents, our doppled displacement, our winter
attuned, pitched in our greeting

homing,
we meet in airports, on outskirts

along the seam between worlds
she is my context

returning after 30 years, and i am hers
at 39 visiting for the first time. my aunt saunters over

& we three become a nation: black, mixed, indian
without a flag to wave, without an anthem, foreign attrition

we rationalize distance: family, job, money, the voylence after sundown
overgrown, trash-strewn

words freighted with estrangement and guilt, we toss them out
and burn them between us. smoke

of our emigrant ceremony, our crossing of pasts, we depart
opposite, along the sentence that encircles the world

Excerpted from Magnetic Equator by Kaie Kellough. Copyright © 2019 Kaie Kellough. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.