Home for a Hybrid

Hull out a little snow
scuffle the Rockies with a toe
to find purchase and set to soil
your own tentative roots;
I held you up as motherland
because I bore your name
across airport gates, humbled
as visitor, foreigner, in lands
that maple leaves dare not grow.

I grew up on gingered-cardamomed-
palm-oiled-coconut-milked-bay-leaved rice
and took in more water than air with each breathful
but somehow turned out so Western on the inside
even as Calgary suns baked my pigmented layers
into cocoa-beaned skin of the East.

You will find home here,
a thousand times over,
in the uncharted boldness of allowance
to show exactly how middle class you are.
Even as I donned my personality
I knew that back East, back Jakarta,
back down, back off, back humble,
backed by contrast that comes
from so many ragged ruined on street corners
who could barely afford your worn sneakers
let alone put themselves in your shoes,
metaphorically. The literal almost always
wins out.

And here I am literally not foreign.
I look the blend that I am with Hispanic uncertainty -
despite lack of Hispanic blood -
I could be from anywhere.
And that is why, here in Canada,
I feel the weather right enough
to plant my seed, hitherto stored
protectively away in a shell of
not knowing what belonging
really means.