Laura Pegram

“Imiti ikula é mpanga.” ― Growing trees are tomorrow’s forests, Bemba proverb. It’s been four years since we landed in America. The dizziness of spinning letters is finally ebbing. The meaning of TOEFL, VISAs, OPT and Adjustment of Status now sits somewhere in a muted white office. Four years. A split second in which mother tongue can drown inside another while I am busy treading new waters.

We live everywhere: half-mooned inside the trunks of coconut trees, pearled in the orange glare of a stray cat’s eye, caught in the diesel from a matatu’s exhaust, coughed up thick and black. We are the brown of wilted jasmine petals, the lone yellow scale on a green mamba snake, the deep pink of freshly cut flesh. We line the insides of mothers’ bellies, tracing the shape of unborn children with our curious fingers, teaching them how to kick. You people do not see us; we are an unseen thing.

After the fourth consecutive time Leon missed practice, Coach Snick pulled a cruel joke and signed him up for the 1600. Leon was a sprinter, the one hundred and the two hundred. Long jump if they were short a guy and 300 hurdles if he trained hard enough, which he hadn’t since high school.