We were Algerians and our country was Algeria. [My mother] explained to me that the French
       were unwelcome occupiers, strangers to our land, our people, our religion, our language, our culture,  
       our history. - Zohra Drif

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A bird shatters a bay window
     with its body.

Shards of glass ground together, resonating
     a ting ting.  To get here,

I stepped into a time machine of character – 
    boarding bittered my tongue.

I swallowed.  I eroded my own throat
     with harsh, spiny burrs.

The vessel boarded near an unmarked mass grave
      crowded by mourners,

wives with eyes exemplified by imperfect gems.
     They palmed panes with red hands

as someone stamped my ticket; another led me
    to an entrance, and the mobs –

they lamented in their madness. The entrance quiet
     for the departure until

a grandiose rasp erupted. Its familiar face whipped
     the soles of my feet to sit next to me.

We didn’t speak as the vessel ventured over bodies;
      what passed us by resolved to arrows.

Spiny burrs stewed in my stomach: soiling,
     contagiously soiling.

Our suffering was extravagant. In my Tamazight tongue,
      I called for my mother,  Xssa Ma! Xssa Ma!

My Tamazight tongue from the town of Algiers, my dad
      told me his daddy died there in the mountains.

Somewhere they searched with fervor.  They searched,
      searched & searched, and eventually,

my dad, he stopped.  Of any return to Algiers, he asks,
      For what?  For madness?

In all our suffering, I remembered the wives and how
     they must have been mothers too.

I am no laborer.  There’s just one place to mourn
    the bones of feathers.  

In my parent’s home, we kneel by the broken window
     on shards of glass to parse a plan –

My dad will dig a small hole to bury the bird.  The rest
      will light candles and choose a good tune.

Then, we will sweep together, and the bird
      who broke the bay window

will return tomorrow in a new form with
     the same fatal intentions.  

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