Do you know the feeling of losing home in your own country? the act of carrying it beneath your feet and God upon your tongue. Inhaling the smell of war through your nostrils. A boy playing in an open field, running for safety—trauma entering the body, it becomes his body. Hear the dirge of birds, see the trees stripped of every beauty, the broken windowpanes that once were an escape, the bodies that slept mistaking the roads for cemeteries. When my father died I thought he was asleep, but my mom said he had gone home to rest. I took sleep to mean home and struggled to survive in one of my dreams, like a bird with broken wings fighting for flight. What is war other than the hunting of a country, what  does home become if not a broken poem, what is broken if not the word that defines how everything loses its identity.

*Photo by Regarn Hope from Unsplash