What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

Insufficient Answers to Customs Officials, Bureau of Unverifiable Provenance, Conakry, 1974
See also:
— On the Impossibility of a Straight Answer, Oral Depositions of the Twice-Displaced, Vol. 3, no pagination
— A Field Guide to Evasion, Institute for the Geographically Uncooperative, Bamako, 1981
— You Don’t Have Clearance for That Information, Proceedings of the Tribunal of None of Your Business, Havana, date: redacted
— Smoke and Its Known Addresses, Coyote Archive, undated

As if origin is a single coordinate. As if I haven’t been composted and replanted so many times the roots don’t even recognize the original soil. As if the answer isn’t a list of evictions, border crossings, three dialects, two dead languages, and a cabin that became an Airbnb before the body was cold.

I’m from the mortar and pestle. From the part of the forest where the GPS gives up. From the back of a truck on a road between Dakar and Saint-Louis where the driver stopped to let a goat decide which way was forward. I’m from a grandmother who never wrote anything down and a tradition that doesn’t survive translation.

Where am I from. I’m from the smoke. Ask the smoke where it’s from and it’ll give you the same look I’m giving you now.