Three boys from the refugee camp

next to my uncle’s house are whipping

a pigeon. They are dusty. I can see

they’re wearing the same clothes

from the day before. The bird is dusty.

It’s not going anywhere. A broken

bird trying to get off the ground sounds like

a rolled-up paper through air, like errant skin.

You ask me to be more intentional.

Today: Work cicatrix into conversation.

Show me your scar, now your limbs—

show me what it is that obsesses.

Ask one question that won’t be answered:

What is it about these parts?

Enumerate the invisible: Not private struggle,

which has its own airglow. Not exactly

the smoke from the fire that zippered more

than it crackled. Not the escape tunnel that led out

from the concentration camp. Not the memory of sea

when we came across seaweed washed up on shore.

These all have their signs and symbols—some way

to point to, at least, the semblance of the thing in question.

The truly unseen—how when I say no one had ever

touched me before, you think of the pyracantha we never planted.

The grass is a little taller, and the clothesline

a little slacker. How there is a certain

strength in name that owes wholly to the intention.

How the wind whispers liberate.

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