P, Saniya. Not Home

Not Home

Saniya P.

A terrorist attack led to us fleeing home My home In this land called America My people are the terrorists The bad ones, bad fruit In this land called America My bloodline stopped with me Without knowing who drew the line first My parents, a mystery That’s why I can’t answer “Where are you from?” Instead, I just look down Suddenly the floor becomes interesting In this land called America My not blood bounded family and I moved here To escape fear, the inevitable In this land called America I question my own tongue In this land called America People question it too Along with me being Muslim, what they claim “doesn’t fit my description” In this land called America We pledge to a flag that promises to speak to “liberty and justice for all” But with every bullet, no justice is served And with every chained arm, liberty falls out of the picture In this land called America There’s a house But it’s not a home My home is back where blood had stained the grass, now painted red And the sky of my world had darkened Not too long ago In this land called America It doesn’t feel like home

Tinker Gordon doesn’t want anything to change. He thinks that if he holds on tightly enough, his family, his tiny Cape Breton Island community, his very world will stay exactly the way it has always been. But explosions large and small—a world away, in the Middle East, in the land of opportunity in western Canada, and in his own home in Falkirk Cove—threaten to turn everything Tinker has ever known upside down. Set variously in the heart of rural Cape Breton, on the war-torn streets of Aleppo and in a Turkish refugee camp, in the new wild west frontier of the Alberta oil patch, and in a tiny apartment in downtown Toronto, Tinker’s family, friends, and neighbours new and old must find a way to make it home. In her adult fiction debut, Alison DeLory ponders a question as relevant in Atlantic Canada as anywhere in the world: where and how do we belong, and what does it take to make it home?