I’ve never liked traveling. It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed living abroad or visiting the various countries that have welcomed my feet. Rather, it’s something in the physical movement from place to place that unsettles. The movement between cultures and languages is a bodily experience; it marks you, and it can be exhausting to learn the new gestures, to contort your limbs into another semantic system, to conjugate your entire tongue. Even after years of not speaking Russian, though, I can still easily pull out the phrase: “My head hurts, do you have any aspirin?”

Read the full article in the November/December 2015 issue of Poets & Writers