I‘ve Called Home.

I’ve called home a mattress that’s not my own, the flannel sheets twisted with our interlocked elbows and knees but also the heartprints of the ones that came before me.

I’ve called home the top bed of a triple bunk in a hostel dorm room that smelled like musty towels and was lit by a solitary white bulb,
where I lay inches from the stucco ceiling and savored my aloneness.

I’ve called home a country that screams its syllables and cooks in a sweet oil that seeps into pores and pools in thick ceramic bowls of noodled soups flavored with pork knuckle.

Home has been the place that birthed me and then baptized and bathed me in summers on bright bodies of water dotted early with a.m. church-goers and later on blue beer cans promising if not salvation,
escape.

I’ve called home sprawling out in a cheap tent under the green palm awnings of some bronzed beach, chasing bliss over and over again at the bottom of a brown sandy bottle with brown sandy lovers.

I’ve called home the smart wit of one lover and the soft lips of another, the ecstasy that makes me feel found in each and every one of them but that leaves me wondering why I can’t just have it all
for once.

I’ve called home three nights or thirteen consecutive, usually wandering somewhere between lost and found and lost again,
my backpack the weight I carry reminding me that I am constant, not consistent.

I’ve called home in different languages, cracking codes to decipher new definitions of old meanings
finally being able to make out the foreign words sung between accordion harmonies and green bottles talking in loud cantinas.

I’ve called home
so many times-
under the stars,
driving by myself down an icy highway,
in the house I grew up in with the friends who still go to the same bars.

But you’re the only one who’s answered in a way that makes me
want to stop calling and arrive with you, to no place in particular,
and feel home

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