There are times I don’t belong to the family.
The baby is too light. The man is too white.
“All together,” they ask. “Oh. He’s your baby,” they wonder aloud.

I try to shake off these invisible people
and all their righteousness that demands
answers about my coupling.

The questions no matter how I try to avoid them follow me
around like silent scavengers looking for my doubting bones.
Who belongs here?

We all belong   here together
even if our faces don’t match
and our histories are complicatedly intertwined
in the language of ‘isms and modernity.
“who belongs here”, we say in a thousand ways.
I hear us, I hear them.

I nod with disinterested eagerness.
Almost like a puppet I use to think.
Now I see that I just don’t have the words to waste on proof.
Not now, not here with these hearts melting in my arms.

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