The burrowing parrot also known as the Patagonian conure also known as the burrowing parakeet is the only bird species with eyelashes. This is a little-known fact. Another little-known fact is that burrowing parrots, while often purchased as pets, become exasperated and violent if caged for too long. Burrowing parrots need interaction. They need color. If you separate two burrowing parrots, in short order the one left behind will die. She will die of loneliness.

Every day at noon we are served lunch. This is how I count the time. We don’t eat with the children, because they are in classes; they eat together, at a different time. Our mud-colored trays are divided into five compartments. Today’s lunch: slivers of white onion, an orange sliced into wedges, white bread (two slices), baked beans from a can. The workers are other detained women who work for three dollars a day. Everyone wants to work, so there are TVs on the wall that list the names of who will work each day and where. Two of the usual workers speak Spanish. They tell me they are sorry to see me here. They tell me, hold on. You’ll be out in no time. One of them gives me my second book of bird facts. I forget how she knows I am interested in birds, but I assume I have told her. I don’t remember where she got the book.

I am friends with all the women. I don’t know all their names. But I know which ones have a sick child, which ones lost a husband in the desert along the way. I know whom to hug periodically, whom to gift extra rations of food. We don’t speak about these—the ones who lost children, who bear wounds of rape or police torture, who are sometimes hauled screaming in the middle of the night to see one of the staff in red polo shirts. That’s where we hope they are taken. They also deport people in the middle of the night. We are given no information, no answers.

Homer or Aristotle or Greek philosophers or Roman naturalists or all of them, I don’t remember which, believed migrating birds were warriors. They believed migrating birds were off to do battle at the end of the earth. I imagine them whirling in a spiral toward the sky, millions of them, millions of wings, one force pulsing, beating. Powerful enough to explode into fire, that beating bird heart, to break any wall.

I don’t know why I am here.