Habitats
I don’t have a homeland.
I have habitats.
A bus window. A stool at the bar’s elbow.
Two tiles near the stove
where steam translates itself
into turmeric-stained maps.
Habitats, what holds.
Not by choice,
but by the long arm of papers,
that airless room beyond passport control,
the body, mind, spirit moving
though the plane has long landed.
Bags once packed like Tetris
unzipped, emptied,
returned as riddles,
the same belongings
yet nothing fits.
Would I ever stand for a fence
as if loyalty were owed to a hill
where the air thins,
balconies tilt
above the rest of us gasping.
I choose
a plant leaning into its inch of light,
the crack in the tiles where air seeps,
the bus window filmed with others’ dreams,
until the wind decides
to belong.
Fulya Pinar is a poet and anthropologist whose work traces displacement, belonging, and everyday intimacies across borders. In her work, she often draws on fieldwork, memory, and material life. Originally from Turkey, they live and write between scholarship and poetry in Middlebury, Vermont.