You find the first verse of homeland encased in the abdomen of a fellow gym-goer. She is aggressively flirty as she pokes a finger through your curls, and when she takes off her shirt to flex—It’s hot in here, isn’t it?—you’re ready to walk out and find somewhere else to lift your weights. Then you see it: tiny towers made out of her liver peeking from within her rib cage, a maze garden carved into her small intestine. A perfect miniature of the city your people have been trapped in for generations.
She notices your stare, how still you’ve gone. You like it? She leans in and this time you don’t object. You touch it with the tip of a finger and find it is warm and pulsating separate from her heartbeat. Gods only know how I can keep up this body with this carved into me, huh?
You make some ambivalent noise. Your own rib cage feels tight around your organs, hot and whole, and you wonder if she can hear your heart pounding like it wants to force its way out. You think you can make out the edge of the shantytown of your birth at the very edge of her pancreas.
When she asks for your number, you give it, and that evening you use sex as a pretense to study the map more closely. Late into the night you find an unfamiliar bridge made out of her appendix that leads nowhere.
• • •
The second verse of homeland picks up along a woman’s scapula. You see it as you wait behind her in the grocery store a month later. You haven’t stopped thinking about the first verse, the poetry and pathways of that tiny city, your whole world—the bridge that doesn’t exist haunts your dreams. You’ve taken to walking the city’s borders to watch the river that has long since replaced the place that raised you. Sometimes you think you can hear whispers—words you cannot make out calling from alleyways that don’t exist. In the quiet moments you remember you’ve forgotten your parents’ voices. You make more than one person uncomfortable by staring hard in the direction of their intestines.
The woman in the store wears a shirt with oblong shapes cut out across the shoulders and chest. Here is the other side of the bridge, all high rails and swooping cables, and there it trails off into a bone city that mounts her scapula, peaks blocky buildings over the top of her upper arm, plunges tramcars down across her clavicle. You circle her as you read the map. Your heart thunders under your own fragile surface. You desperately memorize the meandering pathways and oblique trails, and then realize you’re staring down her shirt. She smiles as you stumble over an apology. The cashier rolls their eyes and you understand she’s a regular here. This is only new to you.
You can look, the woman says.
And so you peer closer, running a finger along the low houses that crowd her chest, brushing ever so lightly across the fields of farmland carved into her breast tissue.
They bloom if you do this. She takes your other hand, presses it against her breast, pushes the whole thing up. Flowers thrust up out of the once-barren fields and a river flows off the tip of her nipple, carved to look like a waterfall. The woman laughs at your awe. She moves your hand away and squeezes your fingers. The last bit is over the river. It’s a beautiful ending.
• • •
Years pass before the third verse arrives unexpectedly. You’ve taken a job working weekends at a morgue—the man who hires you waits with bored impatience for you to finish mixing up your words to ask, Can you start on Thursday? On your third day, you’re opening each drawer, methodically checking that each body is who they’re supposed to be—the man shakes his head when you ask why this is necessary—when you see greenery poking from beneath a plastic sheet. You roll the sheet down carefully.
Beneath, you find a woman’s body with cattails sprouting from the middle of her skull. An exquisite pool lies on one side, etched from soft brain and shot through with undulating waves of razor-thin bone. On the other, a cluster of houses with flat roofs and reclining chairs strikes your restless heart to stillness—you remember this?
You run your fingers through the cattails. The hot lick of humidity peels your edges to the sky—you remember home?Laughter rolls from inside the house. Your grandparents have sweet potato pie and collards. Their grandparents’ grandparents brought okra stew. You’re arriving empty-handed and so tired. But you, your presence, this body that has been gone so long, is enough. It is exactly right, here, so you take their hands and you close your eyes, and there beneath the swamp willows you smell rich dirt and coconut oil and in the end—you remember us, baby?
• • •