Do not stop the home from leaving, from dissolving
its bouldered foundation into the bank of bodies beneath.

So I do not know what to return to. Say, I missed home so much
I dragged my feet across the ocean. Do you recognize me?
The return actually feels longer than when we departed from it,
the country so filled with ache memory it must erase its own brain,
as do I. I refuse the gender binary of the dmz.

This nation knows how to halve and nothing else. For years
I have wondered, which country do I call home? Which conquest
will conquer me back and which border will thieve my face.
Meanwhile, away from home, I ran. Away from you,
I accrued even taller and larger.

Even the populations settled. The day you took me to the parallel,
I felt the grass scratch through my shins. Together
we dragged our blight bodies across the field toward some horizon,
trailing ghost export from the south. There were dandelions.
The sunset bore into our vision and it made me laugh. Grandmother,
if these are two countries, why do you cry?

I’m not sure if I have dreamt of this, but I knew nothing
of what a border looks like — a fishing line launched into a pond,
a dividend, something to cut across on the way home.

Then, I stood at the midpoint, equidistant from every nation
and pondered its abstractions in relation to my gender.

We would be the ocean.

The Trash Mountain Writes to the Future:

In my dreams, with your back to me, you started,
not by slashing. It was unable to be cut into. Instead,

We disarticulated the nation-complex and picked out the bones.
We spread the clay of the remaining body across the earth
and watched seedlings rear from beneath the soil.