Bilingual

My grandmother says she dreams in English now:

fifth language, a final grandchild that will never leave her arms.

Our Scrabble games are a meditation, a rosary of worn wooden tiles;

the scribbled score sheets declare her a master of English wordplay.

I've watched her move through my life in the body of another language

the way a costume, worn day after day, becomes clothing.

But I've overheard enough

to know what she sounds like to another immigrant.

Her voice shifts carefully between the hellos and the grandchild gossip,

slowly finding its stride, until she is all rolling laughter and twisted

consonants.

The switch of her tongue

mimics my body’s changes when I'm in bed with a woman.

We become idiomatic, fluent, our instincts rolling us

until we laugh between gasps and twisted sheets.

And men? I had to learn them, as she learned

all the tricks of English: the silent 'e', the soft ‘ph,’

the placement of lip and tongue, which sounds come

from the throat, and which from the nose, when to breathe.

We embrace the pride and delight of having mastered

something once unfamiliar to our tongues.

Being fluent makes it easy to disguise my foreign roots;

most men would swear that my accent is flawless.

We've both lived in our second languages;

immersed and practiced until they became routine.

I want to tell her:

When I press my palms

to a woman's cheeks and kiss her for the first time, I feel the way

you do picking up the phone to hear "shalom, ma nishma?"

like the locked door, swinging open.

I know it's convenient that I can love boys,

but the feel of a woman’s hands on my skin –

that’s my language.

You know: when your mother tongue finds you, it doesn't matter

the distance, how long it has been

or how broken it is once you find it, it will always feel

as delightful as the first time we spoke. She told me:

b’rucha haba’a –

welcome home.