I buried my name under layers of other peoples’                            lingua,
                                                                                               I mean langue,
I mean                                            language,
distanced it from my mother’s                 لغة.

You still say that my name’s unique
though what you mean is                        not yours
                                    though it rarely feels like mine     either.

je peux écrire
en cuatro idiomas
wa It3alimt ista3mil el-keyboard kidda
so that writing right to left felt backwards
pero

I still get asked how I got so good at English and
you’ll raise your brows when you hear I learned it first.

Why the surprise?
Didn’t you spend generations molding my tongue?

Is it not still bleue from your touch?

Issra Tobah is a writer from London, Ontario. She works as a communications specialist for a local academic consulting company and writes poetry in her free time.