your left hip

crinkled and worn

like the hip I inherited:

a topographical ache

as if a cartographer penned our DNA

to match in rhythms of hurt.

Your mother was hunted down

across Siberian fields;

through serendipity,

luck,

she made it safely

through a war that stole her family’s land.

You were born of her,

displaced in an army camp,

the hot dirt of the Middle East so unlike

the rich soil of Białowieża forest,

your mother’s childhood.

The dry air made you sick:

fevers and rashes abounding despite

prayers for a different tomorrow.

You were carried over oceans,

your mother still caught

in a war she did not start:

both of you abandoned, when it was over,

in the rain-glazed English countryside,

outsiders to those thatched cottage villages,

instead corralled into barracks

breeding resentment and need,

gossip and hunger.

You watched free nations rejoice in their win,

unwilling to acknowledge

the tectonic shift of the land

beneath your ancestry slip,

slipping, slipped, tear

tearing, torn away

from your feet.

This broken legacy

you passed on to me:

displacement is ingrained

in my bones.

I rub my lower back

my left hip

crinkled and worn

like the hip I inherited

a topographical ache

as if a cartographer penned our DNA

to match in rhythms of hurt.