Baggage Claim

I am
the interstitial places
airplanes
airportsbusestrains
open roads between

my hometown is a suitcase

By the time Marion Lougheed turned eighteen, shed moved house eleven times. When she was seven, her family flew from Canada to Benin. Later they moved back to Canada, and then to Belgium and Germany. She went to school in three languages.

This poetry collection is for all her fellow child migrants, third culture kids, hippie kids, cross-culture kids, missionary kids, foster kids, refugees, military brats, and other displaced, uprooted, and mobile children.

Original illustrations by Sarah Balsley, an artist with a mobile childhood of her own.

"These poems ... speak to the quiet grief of leaving and the ache of never fully arriving, to the way the past clings to us in language, in memory, in the body. And yet, threaded through every page is a stubborn, steady hope. The belief that we can keep finding ourselves, piece by piece, no matter how far weve travelled."

- Chanel Sutherland, winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize

"A fierce and tender exploration of what it means to belong nowhere—and everywhere. In poems that traverse continents, airports, and languages, Marion Lougheed maps a life lived between cultures with honesty and grace."

- Jude Neale, author of Water Forgets Its Own Name

"The title asks an important question: when we carry this much baggage with us, what do we claim? This poetry weaves and bobs in search of home, the reader arriving on every shore "with our birthstones in our pockets, one hand on the future, the other tucked into a box in someones attic." Those who have left their hearts in more than one place will see themselves in this collection. I read this collection in a single sitting, but the poems in Baggage Claim have travelled with me long after leaving its pages behind."

- Murgatroyd Monaghan, Grand Prize Winner of the 2023 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, author of white spaces where we learn to breathe