Tuoyo Palmer opens with a passport and a border, two things that should answer the question of where you belong but rarely do. In the poem "A Continent With No Return Address," a man opens his passport at the border as though opening a small door, only to find another country waiting inside it.
The country in the poem sends its people home with a statement. Home, it turns out, is a word that can still be stamped on paper, official and tidy, even when the feeling behind it is anything but.
Palmer holds two facts about this man and lets them do the heavy lifting. His name is Nigerian. His skin is African. That is all, and somehow that is everything. The poem does not resolve the tension between those two truths. It just leaves you standing at the border with him, waiting.
Originally published by Brittle Paper.