I Am Migration

This poem sits somewhere between a handful of things people search for without always finding the right words: poems about belonging, poems about home, poems about identity. I never set out to write into those categories. I just wanted to describe what it actually felt like to not have a fixed answer to any of them, and this ended up becoming one of the migration poems that people connect with for exactly that reason.

I’ve read a lot of poems about identity over the years, and a lot of migration poems too, and the ones that stayed with me were never the ones trying to explain a whole political idea. They were the small, specific ones. That’s what I was aiming for here.

Movement Sits at the Heart of I Am Migration

The poem opens with an image I kept returning to while writing it, travel as water, alive when flowing, rancid if stagnant. Water doesn’t ask permission before it moves somewhere new, and it never loses itself in the process either. That single image is where most of my migration poetry starts, thinking about movement as something alive rather than a break in the story.

What Does Belonging Mean When Life Keeps Moving?

For a long time I thought belonging was a place I hadn’t found yet. Writing this poem changed that for me. What does belonging mean when nothing around you stays still? For me it turned out to be less about a location and more about a relationship, with memory, with the people beside you, with the ground you happen to be standing on right now, even knowing you won’t stand there forever.

Most poems about home assume home is fixed, one address, one map pin. This one doesn’t. It treats home the way it treats belonging, as something you carry and rebuild rather than something you simply arrive at and keep.

Land, Roots and Indigenous Birthright

The poem carries the phrase indigenous birthright because land was never just property to me, it’s inheritance, memory, and connection all at once. This is where the poem stops being only a migration poem and becomes something closer to poetry about cultural identity, one of the poems about identity that asks what it means to belong to the earth itself instead of a single fixed address on it.

“Own Nothing, Steward Everything”

Of every line I wrote, this one took the longest to actually believe. I grew up around the idea that belonging meant ownership, a house, a plot of land, somewhere you could point to and call yours. This line asks something harder. What if belonging was never about owning a place at all, but about how carefully you moved through it while you were there?

Open Borders and the Question of Home

The reference to open borders sits inside this same thread of movement and land. It isn’t a political statement so much as a question I wanted to leave with anyone reading it. When movement is treated as a natural part of life instead of an exception, how do the lines we draw between countries shape who gets to feel at home?

“Treasure Children” and the Breath We Borrow

This is the line that pulls the whole poem back down into something tender. Migration stops being an idea here and becomes a body, a breath, a child who never chose the borders they were born inside of. Nobody owns their breath either, we only get to use it for a while, and then it passes on to someone else.

Belonging Without Owning

If you’ve ever wondered what does belonging mean when your own life keeps shifting under you, I hope this poem gives you some company in that question. You don’t need one permanent place to belong somewhere. Sometimes it looks like caring for wherever you happen to be standing, and trusting that to be enough. Out of all the poems about belonging I’ve written, this is still the one I come back to most.

That belief runs through everything I write, whether the subject is patriarchy, silence, or something further from home. My poem What Is Feminist Poetry? approaches the same questions of freedom and belonging from a different angle, proof that feminist poetry about migration and feminist poetry about womanhood are really asking the same thing: what does it take for a voice to belong fully to itself.

If this piece speaks to you, I’d love for you to read the full poem alongside its Spanish counterpart, Yo Soy Migrante, or spend time with the rest of my Soul of a Woman collection, where a lot of these same questions keep showing up in different forms. And if you’re sitting with your own version of this restlessness, my Illumination Workshop was built for exactly this kind of unraveling, done together, out loud, with other women who understand.

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