Lithuania

I am stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,

And a soaked old rope holds me to the European Coast

It is tethered to the old brick hospital where on the shortest day of the year,

At the turn of a millennium, I said hello to the world at 6:07 in the snowy evening

It is wound around the rungs of the musty stairwell, 

I would run up to fall into my grandma's arms

It follows the winding cobblestone streets of the old town,

Hears the stories it holds in its creaky bones
It ties me to Lithuania

The rope pulls taut each time a wave crashes against me,

Furiously trying to throw me west

I build my learned English into elegant poems and stories and essays,

While the briny spray eats away at my Lithuanian sentences

I desperately fish with my hands in the churning ocean of letters,

To find the ones I need to fill the gaps

But the syllables I need slip through my fingers,
Which seem only to get clumsier with time

I am afraid that every last word will sink to the depths of my memory

I am afraid that my anchor will unravel entirely,

And that one night I will succumb to the drift of the ocean
Wake up a different person

So I hold onto my memories as if they are my life-giving rations

But on the teetering boat, consuming them makes me sick with longing

I catch a smell like that of my grandma's soap,

In the little plastic tray in her cramped bathroom

And I remember the stools in her tiny kitchen I would overlap

To form an airplane I could fly up and away

I remember the sturdy wooden table in her living room,
That I hid under after breaking one of her meticulously decorated eggshells

I remember the shelf packed with captivating science books,
The desk full of faded journals and mysterious treasures

The toy tank, the spiral whisk, the knitted butterflies,
Old albums, nettle soup, hot water bottles, and hair curlers

Every time we say our goodbyes and drive away,
Their worried faces, wringing hands, and whispered prayers,
Tear a gaping hole through me
They make me wish I was a god that could move the earth,
And push my two homes together
But as the plane rises through the clouds,
My stomach drops, and the air presses in on the sides of my head,
All I can do is cry