“Reluctant Immigrant” by Aileen Dosev

Feelings for the homeland

delayed like the 8-hour flight.

Are you excited to go? you are

excited to go

I once choked on a room

of fifteen cigarettes, if only

to say, “Аз съм българче.”

Blending with street ash

and the fourth failed parliament,

my bilingual tongue splutters

like a Lada engine.

My dad draws our family tree

upside-down with missing names.

Aunts and cousins haunt the page,

tombstones for the living

we dared to leave behind.

Aileen Dosev is a poet studying business, sustainability, and complex systems at the University of Michigan. When inspiration strikes, she brews her poems in a cast-iron pot with bay leaves and a splash of irony.

Artist’s Statement: “As a daughter of Bulgarian immigrants, I want to capture my feelings of displaced nostalgia while traveling to the country of my heritage. Are we traveling back or to? What is lost in the cracks?”