also for my father

Him: a brackish lagoon,
the sun a wire hyssop
on my lips. He never walked

this salt-coarse sand
my blistered feet
trace their search on.

                 * * *

The only thirst here:
mine. Sanderlings and dunlins

drink the Atlantic, snort
its brine, will soon breed summer

again in Hudson Bay.
Unless I come too close

I am not
of their world.

                 * * *

Like the least terns,
he came north to Florida
bruised in the crossing:

everything that flies
takes off and lands
in to the wind,

that spiritus mundi—
aloft, who knows
what furies await.

                 * * *

A rare bird on this beach:
a rufous fowl, adrift

with the tide. He did not fly
nor try to fly. I gave him

one dry night
on a full stomach,

carried him
light as ashes in another box.

He had no name I knew.
He did not live

in any guidebook.
I've watched

for others since, intuiting
birds weren't migrants once

but grew into it, that balance
of need: to settle in lack

or to go on looking
for what isn't there.
from the book THIRD WINTER IN OUR SECOND COUNTRY / Trio House Press
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The poem was the last one in my first chapbook (Paper Nautilus Press). The last lines of the poem were the title of the chapbook: "looking for what isn't there." No one so far has mentioned that.

Andres Rojas on "Looking for Migrants"
Cover of We Call to the Eye & the Night
"A Conversation with Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck"

"We have a beautiful range in terms of different interpretations of love but also different ages, different generations, different countries, not just US-centric. Hala has spent a lot of time in the Arab world. I was still back in Dubai when this anthology was in process, and so we recognize, yes, you're talking about writing in English, so there are a lot of people from the US, but we wanted as much as possible not to center America."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Matt Donovan on Other Arts

"Yet, as with each of the blackout poems I wrote for our Missing Department project (twenty-five in all), there were always more resonant and unexpected meanings to explore beyond any words the two texts happened to share. Although I might have been initially pleased to make a connection between the mother's address in Klamath Falls and the story's descriptions of a river that ran through the center of its fictional town, for instance, the presence of moving water ended up affording me the poem's core metaphor."
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