Citizen by Marriage
Documented
Here the signs twist into ciphers and my translation marks me mute.
My silver tongue now a fortune of bad currency, illegal tender,
and until I build my ship of Theseus out of idiom and expertise,
my fingers fumble syllables, phonemes, meaning, always off-key.
I want to tell the exact hue of home I left but it all blurs into blue.
I raised my children left-handed until a TV cracked a code switch
and now they sing the strange symbols by heart.
Now tourist their mother tongue, a city unseen.
Now know the backs of their right hands like houses,
like bedrooms, can touch every shelf where a shade of blue rests
and grasp without a need to reach. Here I became my husband’s child
and he consoled me, he to speak in gold teeth while I at the shops
must only point, and then pick something up
and use it to do something called getting by.
I signed my slip into a ring my mother warned against
and now I warn my children with both hands.
The waiting chain wraps around the bloc,
we stand for stamps, staggered
feet shift ripples down to the corner
and send shivers back up, the paper shuffle, a card trick.
An accordion crumple, it breathes foreign
script, how we are bound
by bodies and laws that imagine them.
I peel in paperwork, proof, a square of myself
that resided once. She riffles existence,
dirty white, and I want to become, to be
born into paper. Her hand cuts
at the slice of sheet music.
Anna Nunan's writing has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Flash Fiction Magazine and others. Her poetry was commended in the 2018 Shepton Mallet Snowdrop Festival competition. She is a first reader for The Masters Review and The Line Literary Review.
