2020 oakland youth poet laureate—“Tourist” BY Greer Nakadegawa-Lee

Greer Nakadegawa-Lee
2020 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate
Art by Robert Liu-Trujillo

Tourist
By Greer Nakadegawa-Lee

As if my whole body is just surface.
As if I could peel away my skin,
as if I could strip away,
as if removing parts would somehow make me into who I was always meant to be,

a child of spirit,
a child of trees flowering out of my fingernails,
rows of classrooms,
rows of offices all stacked up in my straight spine,
a child of a nation,
a child whose body is
a nation,
I want to be who I was always meant to be.

Some days I am all body.
I am all stomach,
all knuckles and knees and dead skin,
other days I am the great-granddaughter of a country in which I am a tourist,
I could say
I am just an American tourist in Japan,
but that’s not the full story,
the truth is I am always a tourist in my own body.

And America,
her soil knows this about me.
That I am not a child of spirit,
I am flesh and blood and hers in all my colors,
and despite it all I do not think she wants me if I’m like this,
even though generations of my family have made me America’s daughter
I still cry for phantom limbs.
I still hurt as though my skeleton belongs somewhere else,
for countries I can never call home.

Sometimes I feel more split than mixed.
Explosions defining the strongest borders in my blood,
and in this way I am a child of nations,
in this way,
my body understands more about history than I ever will

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BIO

Greer Nakadegawa-Lee is 16 years old and a junior at Oakland Technical High School. She has written a poem every day for over two years now, and she is the 2020 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her first chapbook, "A Heart Full of Hallways" is out now with Nomadic Press. Greer writes poetry that is both a demand for us to all critically examine the world around us and an intimate personal exploration of her own deepest thoughts and experiences.