Where You Are

It is how I fell

in love with a one-room flat

seven thousand miles away

jutting from a mountainside

toes on the dirt path 

to my front door. 

It is how I roamed a fool

through an old city 

where people were strange, 

oh yes, I the stranger.

Letters and words

so big for my little mouth. 

It is how I stuck,

a girl-tipped pin on a map,

foreign droplet 

in curls of ocean

east, west, and south.

Fenced by the enemy

twelve kilometers

to the north.

It is how love lingers

in a contrary little place

old and beaten by history

tramontane bayonets

waiting on shoulders of fear

for some ancient retribution.

It is how a soul stretches

across delicacies and rhyme

along the cracks of dictum

yet the heart is never reaching

for a chest too far to fill.

It is how my feet remember,

when the way gnarls round and back again,

that home is never 

a place you are not,

but is always 

the place where you are.  

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Trifecta Week Thirty-Eight- home:

"a : a familiar or usual setting : congenial environment; also :the focus of one's domestic attention <home is where the heart is> b : habitat"

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