A boy is thumping his basketball on the back of my seat. His awkward legs spill into the aisle. The 3:30 bus is packed, mostly high schoolers on their way home. I'm reading the Nobel lecture by Seamus Heaney, the part about his childhood, "a den life," "an intimate, physical, creaturely existence." About the radio signals trickling in on rainy nights, the bigger world. The kids sometimes overwhelm or annoy me, but today I love them, their smells of gym socks and hairspray and and a dozen kinds of spice coming out in sweat.
Just across the aisle are two girls, a willowy black girl with blue marks on her cheeks, a hijab, a skirt falling over straight to her ankles beneath a jean jacket. An square little Indian girl with close-bitten nails, baby-doll T, a red bandana in her hair, and a bindi dot. In their two accents, they are trying to explain where they are from. The smaller girl traces an invisible map on the panel in front of her -- here's Canada, the US, Mexico -- she leans far over, across the other girl, all the way to another continent.
two immigrant girls --
countries of dust
on the bus windows
