sometimes i wake up in empty fields, waiting for the aliens to take me. they haven’t yet, but any day now, i’m sure. maybe they forgot who they were here to pick up, & i feel that. sometimes i open the fridge & forget what i want. i give in to the electric hum under the reasoning that i must be part hum under all this hair i let the electrologist come for. maybe rolling my R’s & not knowing if the homeland is mine to hold but having its ghosts emerge from my follicles as soil makes me alien enough. i could call parts of the atmosphere mine because it too, holds ghosts. but i look up there with less fear than the people who look like me but live farther away can. i’ll never know the earth the way they do. my parents still do, with their thicker tongues & vibrant throat pulsars, radiating. they say “falling stars” not “shooting stars” & then they say prayers. i know this yet still feel owed a wish. or a flying saucer. or a beam of light. something both here & not & something leaving flowers growing in its shadow -- a bed of softness i mistake for my skin & oh god maybe they’re still circling the block, waiting for me to look away. they might have all the information they need. i know this because i have cells in me that are always kind of sad when the train pulls into the station & it’s the same part of me that never finishes my coffee & i think that part of me hides in the lump in my left breast. the same one the doctors swear isn’t there. the ultrasounds won’t betray its shadow, but it slips under passing satellites when my mother corners it with holy water & a prayer unfurling from the trunk of her throat, this ancient seed she holds steady becoming an eye in her chest, opening just for me. even the darkest part of me doesn’t want to hurt my mother. still, i wonder what i will leave in my shadow as i ascend from the earth & how far i can throw the invisible black box so i don’t have to listen to just how not of the homeland i might be. what if i am the looming hum falling on villages full of people who look like me? so i wait to activate into softness the way grass always finds the arteries in pavement and reaches through. i don’t even need to be a field of flowers just let me be a field just let me hold one flower