the first time i felt home was

laying with you, bodies pink with mosquito bites
and youthful tension, on your plot of dirt and grass
and love. all that time ago. I was seventeen. a Japanesey,
Pohnpeian Filipina hybrid, skin untouched by sun and
hair brown like coconut husk. a boonie dog of her own making.

this will be ours one day, you grinned, and our son’s too
if you’d let me, your teeth yellow from cigarette and betel nut
like they’d been since we were fifteen. mine, still trimmed with metal.

those college-boy words sounded so adult on your lips and somehow
between the unfurling of dog rope and light brushes of hand
on thigh, breath on neck, I believed you when you promised that
we’d continue to listen to rain on tin roof, talk poetry on blue afternoons,
and walk our dogs through chickens and concrete until the greenery of
our childhood turns gray and memories are creased at the corners of our eyes.

I believed in your magic.

because even though I sprouted in Ypaopao as a girl and was
eventually repotted in Mangilao, I only ever felt rooted in your arms,
in your small patch of Yigo.

Maya Nena Desnacido Nanpei is one of Guåhan’s many adopted daughters. Although she is new to writing, she hopes to continue to find herself in her poetry and poetry within herself.