Margarita Gurgutsova has been writing for the past 9 years, expanding from purely creative writing, to poetry, song-writing, journalism and professional copywriting. Margo actively performed in Malaysian poetry scenes since 2017 and later moved to Canberra in 2018 to start university. Now that the degree is done and dusted, Margo works as a tutor for Criminology at the ANU, and works part-time as a manager at the Canberra Theatre Centre. Margo currently engages in slow living.
#2
my motherland to me,
is as distant as my own mother.
it birthed me with
a language that gives the upper hand, and nothing else;
a culture that paints me as someone i am not
and hardly ever will be;
relatives whose faces i have only ever seen on screens;
and then it sent me across timezones
bearing empty memories like scars.
my motherland has been through revolutions, war and anguish
and yet i was educated on the blood of my people
as a subsection in a chinese high school.
angmokia, people call me
and i laugh.
laughed*
now i wonder,
what pride is there in not belonging
© Margarita Gurgutsova, 2023
be:longing 