ÉTATSUNOISE
after the double crossing
My great-grandmother went south with her family.
Someone must have said there was work.
Someone must have said it would put bread on the table.
Lowell and its mills. The river already tired.
Brick holding the day’s heat. Dust settling everywhere, in hair, in lungs, in the crease of sleeves.
The smell of it. Clean at first. Almost sweet.
Then damp, metallic, the sour note
of machines that never rested.
She learned that smell.
It threaded the walls. Stayed in her hands.
She went north again.
Returning was what remained once the work had taken enough.
Later, pépère went south too.
He crossed carrying what she had carried north,
and something that had survived it.
His sweaters always smelled faintly of fresh cotton,
even clean,
even folded away.
As if the mills had kept a gentler version of themselves just for him.
I remember pressing my face into the wool
at his shoulder,
that dry, soft scent, foreign and familiar at once.
Pépère’s memory travels through fabric, through breath, through what the body learns
without being told.
The border was crossed. Then crossed again. The stories kept both directions.
the weight of doubled ground
État comes from status
but further back there is polis,
the place where one learns how to stand among others,
how to belong without being
absorbed.
From syn, together. From henosis, the act of becoming one without erasing the parts.
French at the table. English in the street.
The step forward, the step back. Weight shifting.
Like dancing, something close and formal, requiring restraint.
You move because you trust the one beside you will be there when you turn.
I live in the United States, but I am not finished with Québec.
The history stays warm in my hands. The past self does not disappear.
The rise and fall of sentences. The practiced smile of fluency.
The moment when both feet leave the floor and you feel, briefly,
what it means to be held by more than one place.
Then gravity returns.
Bills. Weather. The news.
The ordinary remembering who we are.
Still, the body keeps what it has learned.
Étatsunoise
lets me face the sun from where I stand
and still feel the pull of another ground.
Je suis étatsunoise.
Not because I hover between. Because I have learned the steps.
Because I know how to stay in the movement and call it home.
dearborn
Lebanese grocers on Warren Avenue
sell za’atar next to the Polish bakery’s pączki,
and somewhere in that space
my grandfather’s French found a way to stay.
This is a city built on innovation.
First the railroad. Then the factories.
Then workers enduring monotony in cathedral-like halls.
The Rouge Plant
still huffs its breath across the neighborhood,
asthmatic, iron-thick,
that tang of what gets made when ore turns into dreams.
Rouge
A word once meant for red clay near the river.
At the bus stop, a Yemeni father speaks to his daughter the way mine spoke to me,
in a language he hopes she’ll use to dream,
already half slipping from her.
I know that look. The watching.
The careful attention as she toggles between worlds in a city of arrived and not arrived,
of assembly lines and assembled selves.
For those who remain.
The woman at the grocery store apologizes for her English.
It is perfect, only carried differently,
the way water holds the shape of what contains it.
I’m going by the store. Close the light.
At the Curtis Street
house
there is a door frame.
The porch looks the same. The keys belong to another family now.
They don’t remember him. Why would they?
He is a name in tax records,
a signature on a deed before theirs. They cut down his tree,
the one by the garage,
at the back gate, one of the last
gifts of life he planted
so something would remain.
It didn’t. But I remember. What they could not touch
was the grammar of staying. The way a life learns to root sideways,
to grow under fences, to survive by remembering itself aloud.
If the tree is gone, its shade is not. It lives in my mouth when I speak,
in the cadence that refuses to choose, in the country I carry in the insistence
that this place, too,
has always been home.
Oikos.
The house as dwelling, as the life lived inside the walls.
This is mine. Writing the proof that we did not vanish.
Je suis étatsunoise.