Someday We’ll Share Lungs
by Emerson Amaya
Arizona State University
Emerson Amaya is a first-generation college graduate and poet based in Arizona. Their work explores memory, identity, and the body through sensory-driven language. They are the 2026 Dean’s Medalist for English at Arizona State University.
i was born on a monday in february, early enough to scare the nurses—my lungs
smaller than the spoon they fed me with, mouth closed like habit. my mother
didn’t hold me right away, said she needed sleep. i watched her blink
at the wall instead of me. it’s strange, how even then i felt like a guest
in my own life. honeyed skin under fluorescent bulbs, brown eyes warmed by the sun. i learned early
to say thank you in two languages, even when i didn’t know what i was thanking. this is home.
or the idea of it. my grandparents scrubbed floors until their bones knew the floor’s shape—home
was the scent of garlic on my abuela’s hands. sometimes i forget i have lungs
because they never ache like hers did. the air in this country is soft, like early
apologies. i keep dyeing my hair—blue, red, brown again—trying to be someone my mother
might name without shame. my smile, always closed. not for modesty. just a guest
in a face that keeps changing. i am learning to stay. i am learning to blink
and see what’s here: jacaranda in the neighbor’s yard, thick with color. the blink
of porchlights at dusk, kids chalking sunflowers into the asphalt—this version of home
feels too lucky, too much like a poem that ends on breath. i am only a guest
in this safety. across the world, a girl presses her back to a wall, trying to shrink her lungs
into silence. she’s eighteen, same as me once. she writes her name in dust. her mother
teaches her how to run before she teaches her to write. the body learns fear early.
we both want to be poets. both believe in the softness of nouns. both touch the early
pages of books like skin. we are mirrors, fractured only by land. i blink
at the syllabus on my screen, underline metaphors that feel like a second mother—
language that lets me hold what she cannot. last week she messaged me: “does the word home
mean somewhere you’ve stayed, or somewhere you pray to stay?” i didn’t know. my lungs
felt full and useless. what can i say to someone whose prayers aren’t guests,
but permanent? i write her poems. she sends back ones about mangos and fire. a guest
professor says our generation is too obsessed with memory. i think about her—hungry early
morning under curfew, no fruit but bitter oranges, and how she wrote even the lungs
of trees here choke on the smoke. she is real. not metaphor. i touch my chest and blink
back the urge to erase all my poems. i want her to know she is not a line. she is home.
and if there is god, then god is the dirt that carries her footprints. if there is god, then mother
is a synonym for absence. mine loves me in sighs. hers in scarfs tucked tight. each mother
learns to lie in their own way. i was raised by people who knew how to live as guests
in a nation that never invited them in. still, they planted basil, called it home.
i walk the backyard and touch the branches slick from rain, their spines early
with fruit. i think of her—how nothing grows where she is except the heat. i blink
at the sky like it might speak. this poem breathes because i have lungs.
she says, write me alive. i touch the keys with both hands. blink.
in the mirror, my body is still mine. early scars, dyed hair. i am a guest
in peace, in poems. i am the motherland she deserves. i carry her in my lungs.