Features of a Map

What does it mean
to be called,
 
Hija de tu vida,
“daughter of your life”? 
 
Does it mean,
I will taste your homesick
rage, each day, in every 
Café con leche you make?
 
Does it mean,
I will kneel for your remedies,
even as they cause
my knees to bleed?
 
Does it mean we are
blood-sealed, and trauma-bound, 
each contraction an oath,
an ancestral burden?
 
Does it mean,
I have a twin, 
Hija de mi muerte,
“Daughter of my death?"
Do you sometimes
mistake me for her?
 
Does it mean,
I am a skinwalker, 
embodying familiar 
streets from home?
 
Does it mean,
when I darken in the sun,
I become your Cartagena,
your Medellín?
 
Am I your new country?
 
Hija de mi cuerpo . . .
“Daughter of your body—”
 
Meaning, I was born blue,
born foreign and foreigner,
wearing a rope of flesh & blood
like a choker around my neck.
 
Meaning, when I was born
you forced your fingers
between my ribs and pulled out
a stone shaped like a continent.
 
Meaning, when I learned to walk
I wore the river Magdalena on my back,
my brown body an unsteady map
tripping over latitude and longitude. 
 
Meaning, I fell from the 
borrowed sky of an alien country 
and I have been falling inside
its rusty apology ever since.