Home

I want to take you home.
No, not to my apartment —
that would be weird since
this is just our first date.
No, I mean, home like
where I'm from
but,
it doesn't exist yet.

The first place I'd take you
after we wake up in my homeland
is for a picnic in a cemetery,
so we could stroll among the tombstones
of patriarchy and apartheid;
of capital and colony.
Gardens glisten upon their graves,
have blossomed there for centuries,
and their fruit is freely grown
and freely given,
and it tastes as sweet as goodness.

The second place I'd take you
is a proper restaurant, but
without prices, they work a little differently.
We work for passion and joy.
We can do what we love,
so we love what we do,
and so many people love to make food.
After all,
cuisine is one of the most ancient forms
of social reproduction,
and few sorts of work are more valuable
to a social species.
Before we eat, you might hear me say
takthauma-bilachte:
everything delicious is sacred.
I'd treat, but — no prices.
If I said Yucateca-Punjabi,
would you think it sounded tasty?
Would you be willing to try?

The third place I'd take you
is my parents' place, or rather,
the place I was raised.
They aren't my genetic parents but
that's not something anyone thinks about
except for here in the past.
In my native tongue, parent is a verb.
It's something you do.
You live up to the work,
and that makes you a parent.
Providing genetic material, well,
you can do that without even trying,
but the eight adults I call pa'ti —
that is, ma and pa and all that —
for me and a dozen siblings
they tried their hardest.

I want to take you home because
we keep getting looks around here,
looks I don't like.
Whether it's because
my skin reflects light
and yours absorbs it
or because
my estrogen is exogenous
and yours is endogenous,
they can't seem to keep quiet
the opinions their eyes shout.
I find it hard to ignore that
in your time
apartheid isn't dead.
He's sitting at the bar, leering.
He's in the exec suite, laughing.
He's in the room with us
even when we're alone.

So, I wish I could take you home, but
the road to it is a temporal one.
Driving there doesn't take a car.
To travel that way takes a vehicle called
struggle.
Apartheid lives and breathes
through the inertia of institutions,
through a great deal of intentional work.
I couldn't kill him alone if I tried;
that's not how one murders a god.
Together,
the path to my home is being paved
by more hands of more generations
than could ever be counted.
Besides, I didn't get here by time machine.
I drove from my apartment.
Maybe someday I can invite you there
and serve you something homemade:
a curry, with love, from the future.