You Are Not a Sparrow

This is what I would remember most from re-tracing the scarab-line of vehicles across a militarized border back into a country that had felt less like mine with each day’s passing. It wasn’t the border agent who startled at my lone, blue book in a clutch of green passports, or the way his face dropped with each answer that erupted from me. No, I don’t live in Albuquerque anymore. Yes, I came to see my husband. No, I haven’t seen him since he deported—almost a year ago. This is my first time crossing. It wasn’t the way Alejandro’s face crumpled, half-shadowed beneath his braids, when we were told he could not approach the wall—that our goodbyes would happen right there, on his front porch. It wasn’t his tiny cousin, who nudged me in the first silent minutes of the somber car ride, her smile bright enough to combat the tears that silently slipped down. I like your earrings—you speak Spanish? She’d translated, her phone a lantern’s glow.

What I couldn’t shake was the feeling that I’d been slapped, literally, into the country on the back of an eagle’s wing. By the time I burst into his friend’s house past midnight, his falconer father had been tucking his latest assignment to bed—an adolescent kestrel, bribed hours earlier with a mouse and snarl of wire. Little guy, ain’t he? Not like our golden. He twisted the cuff of his leather glove every conceivable angle. I watched, transfixed, as he stabilized himself—a gyroscope of feathers with eyes that reflected the starlight. You seen the golden, right?

Dusty from crossing and delirious from the road, I shook my head, silent. I’d known about the birds entrusted to his care before, but never demanded to see them—harboring a fear that, had I approached wrong, I’d be turned down by these avian sentries. But, before I could protest, I felt the gentle tugging of the falconer’s gloved hand in my own, leather straps tightening into place. Come ‘round to the kitchen, it’ll be easy, promise. As I followed, I imagined the feel of the baby kestrel perched on my fingertip. When the falconer re-appeared—in a thrust of feathers and a trick of the light—he’d bestowed the entirety of the golden eagle’s weight onto the branch of my arm, her hooded head bowing to me, wings raised in frozen flight.

I’d thought, then, of the tangle of sparrows snared in the talons of that golden eagle as they scrawled through the clouds above the border. Good luck, you wanted to see one! Alejandro’s step-father had said. I think we’re the sparrows, I’d ruminated, watching the fight tearing through the sky. With each wing beat drumming against me—insistent, rhythmic—the falconer worked at the hood, her talons locking tighter into my knucklebone. When she could, her ember eyes blazed, molten, into mine. Stupid girl, don’t you understand? She seemed to say. You are not the sparrow—but an eagle.

Brianna G. Reed is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa