A bird shatters the bay window with itsbody,
Every shard of bloody glass hits the floorat the same time,
Resonating on tile with an ecstatic ting ting. To get here,
I stepped into a time machine of character–
Passing unmarked mass graves, cementtrucks, crowds of wives
Palming the outside panes with red hands,their eyes exemplified by imperfect gems.
Boarding left bitterness on my tongue
To be swallowed,
Eroding my throat with the harshness ofspiny burrs.
Someone stamped my ticket, another lead meto the entrance of a tunnel,
And the mobs, they lamented in theirmadness.
The entrance quiet for the journey
Where I sat alone in an almost stupor. A grandiose rasp
Offended me. Someone slapped the soles of my feet to sitnext to me, and
We said nothing of the turbulence. I resigned to the window seat.
Everything that passed us by resolved toarrows.
Spiny burrs stewed in my stomach:
Soiling, contagiously soiling.
Our suffering was extravagant.
In the Tamazight tongue, I called for mymother, “Aie Ma, Aie Ma”.
Then, I think about the wives, how theymight’ve been mothers too.
My Tamazight tongue from the town ofAlgiers,
My dad once told me his daddy died thereprobably in the mountains
Somewhere they searched with fervor. They searched, searched & searched,
And eventually, my dad,
He stopped. Of any return to Algiers,
He proclaims, “For what? For madness?”
I remember again I am no laborer. There’s just one
Place to mourn the bones of feathers, adeterioration vanishing
To shut eyes, to snares shot off by sinkingships.
In the kitchen of my parent’s home, wekneel on shards of glass
To sparse out a plan. Someone will dig a small hole to bury thebody,
Then sweep. Another will light a candle and play a holiday track,
And the bird who broke the window
Will return again the next day in a newform
With the same fatal intentions.