There’s nothing shocking about the muted comfort 

that comes with this late-night detox—a cellular,

viral reminder of how my body rejects this land.

I avoid it. I wash hands, purify, wipe clean

the lip of the bottle. Pass the water through, filtered.

Yet the stomach still knows, understands the gap.

The process began earlier. Words formed a gap

between me and my grandparents’ comfort,

voices put on speakerphone and filtered

through my mother’s interpretation. Our cellular

connection didn’t make the break any more clean,

and it takes a decade for the joke of my alienation to land.

When I was five, though, I would look down at the slat of land

as I deboarded the plane in Guate, would hop over the gap

separating Guatemala City exhaust from the cabin-pressure clean

of sanitized air. Elmo in hand, I found comfort

breathing in the sunny smog of the airport. On a cellular

level, this felt like home unfolding on the tarmac, unfiltered.

It takes decades of seeing Guatemala filtered,

a rose-colored, government-censored, trauma-free motherland,

for me to question whether cellular

inheritance means enough. Whether my claim to the gap

that is diaspora is sufficient to comfort

me as I sit in this bathroom, bowels clean.

This cycle of upset stomach feels like coming clean:

an acknowledgment that even when drinking water filtered

through plastic jug and fire, the body finds a sick comfort

in immunizing itself against my attempts to pass through this land

that feels like it should be home. Instead, it spies the gap

in my lips as I fumble a conjugation. Its attack is cellular.

Tomorrow we’ll send samples to the lab. For now, I pick up cellular

phone, detach myself from the smell of clean

bathroom bleach that sticks to my skin, the gap

between the curtains letting in the filtered

light of a moon that I’d rather see from my own land

right now, where I can stomach this discomfort.

There, I could fill this gap in gut bacteria, eliminate the cellular

difference in comfort—with apple cider vinegar, not Pedialyte.

I could let the clean flow of filtered water fill my mouth in the shower,

not worrying where it will land.

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