MY FATHER FINDS HOME

MY FATHER FINDS HOME THROUGH THE BIRDS

THREA ALMONTASER

Pigeons on Broadway follow him like winged guards. He bargains with a yard fnch to peck us

when we cuss. Someone’s love birds let loose

in the hood & my father calls them

with a whistled song, the soft clapping of his heart. Along broken leaf light, he marvels a hawk’s lonesome fight

into the emptiness, its feathered breast a qibla. He can’t trace his footprints.

He still wants to belong, even after leaving.

How does a Baba know when to remain, & when to unravel the nest? He grew among the ancient zaytun his whole

childhood, & see how they spill

their oil on his arms

like an invasive species. I peck for something daughterful, something that won’t chip

his teeth, leave seed pits

in his shoes. I long to hang our homeland

on the wall, eat it like a beak hammering at bark, the violent hunger. For someone to point me on a map, take their fnger

& say, Here she is. Darwish wrote, Words are a homeland. So I bring my father to listen to a white professor describe

the village his family comes from

to feel less alone. It is stunning, words I would wrap

in a gift box, place in front of his mother’s prayer rug. But somewhere in the bucolic, a cousin digging, ruby-throated, searching

for his leg. Te neighbor, grass in her mouth, spitfeeding her baby. Maybe it’s how the man says soil, the way he uses crimson

to evoke our mud brick homes.

Or maybe it’s how he compares noon refecting of the mountain’s fog to fre. My father’s America has a thicker mist

than those Yemen woodlands. My father’s America has a glass window where he sees someone like him,

fies forward too fast, concussed

& caught in the long wind.

I bite into olive stones to feel my Baba’s migration. I hurl them into ponds — the way Zeus hurls his bolts of jewel orchids, lamping the sky.

Tere is a raptor collecting fox fur in his beak, held by the sky like large spectral hands. Who decides to extend

into that deafbarren gap, but the thing

that wholly gives in? Tere is a submission in fying, in the wind that gathers him, feathers splayed

& begging the sky to grant

just an eighth of its tribe to call his.

Nancy Lupo, Bench 2016, 2016, exhibition view, Dodge Caravan License Plate 7KAA008, Los Angeles, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles.