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I am not murdered, and I am not missing, but parts of me have been disappeared. — Leanne Simpson They too know all too well that some cracks were built just for us to fall through.
 We live in a world that tries to steal spirits each day; they steal ours by taking us away. From Industrial Schools to forced assimilation, genocide means removal 
of those who birth nations — our living threatens. Colonization has been choking us for generations. I tell my girls they are vessels of spirit, air to lungs expanding; this world cannot breathe without us. There are days 
I wish I didn’t have to teach these lessons, but as an Indigenous womxn 
silence is deadening. There is danger in being seen, our bodies are targets marked for violence. We carry the Earth’s me too inside us, 
a howling wind, our mothers & their mothers swallowed these bullets long ago. The voices ricochet I wish I were invisible I wish I were invisible 
I wish echoes
 in my eardrums — we know what it’s like to live in fear. Colonialism’s bullet sits cocked, waiting behind a finger on trigger. We breathe and speak and sing
 for survival. We carve out in lines; we write —I know joy I know pain I know love I know love I know— lessons we’ve carried throughout time. Should I go missing: don’t stop searching; drag every river until it turns red and the waters of our names stretch a flood so wide it catches everything. And we find each other whole and sacred, alive and breathing and breathing and breathing.

Dear Miss, First of all I want to say that I have enjoyed the imaginary possibility, built of course on the fact that such possibility does exist in nature: I have seen the birds and other forms of nonhumanity occur in such postures that must be with men and women....I have imagined myself in such postures with you, where flight was discouraged only by the inherent possibility of the firm horizontal... As men give vast lands to little papers with line and color, I have imagined more on the surface of your body, giving all the universe in this model.... Yet, I must be curious about your breasts...curious...hungry is the word, to see, to touch, to taste....I am curious as to how your hands undress your body. I am interested in your mind: will you undress in front of me? Will you permit me the unparalleled pleasure of taking your clothes off? I feel that if I should have my penis in your vagina I should have your love; for you do not receive the wretched hardness of my desire into the sweet body of yourself without that you have not come to love me for reasons, if love has reasons, I cannot tell.... Your admirer

for B. H. I didn’t fall in love. I fell through it: Came out the other side moments later, hands full of matter, waking up from the dream of a bullet tearing through the middle of my body. I no longer understand anything for longer than a long moment, or the time it takes to receive the shot. This kind of gravity is like falling through a cloud, forgetting it all, and then being told about it later.On the day you fell through a cloud . . . It must be true. If it were not, then when did these strands of silver netting attach to my hair? The problem was finding that you were real and not just a dream of clouds. If you weren’t real, I would address this letter to one of two entities: myself, or everyone else. The effect would be equivalent. The act of falling happens in time. That is, it takes long enough for the falling to shear away from the moments before and the moments after, long enough for one to have thought I am falling. I have been falling. I continue to fall. Falling through a ring, in this case, would not mean falling through the center of the annulus—a planet floats there. Falling through the ring means falling through the spaces between the objects that together make the ring. On the way through, clasp your fists around the universe: Nothing but ice-gravel. But open your hands when you reach the other side. Quickly, before it melts. What did I leave you?

Many months have passed since the diagnosis, and you’re still grieving for her. She’s not dead yet. But she’s lost, like a child is lost— her mind the ocean floor, where she kicks up sand and churns in the water. Al, we call it, or AD— never by its real name as if mentioning the word would bring bad luck— the need to cross one’s self across the heart, throw back to the ocean half of one’s catch, turn three times and pray to the East. Papa’s and her letters, written during their courtship, are tied with a faded, red ribbon and sunk in a safe deposit box at Bishop Trust. Long ago, she gave them to you for safekeeping. At the time she exacted a promise from you, that you would not read them until she was dead. We twist down the spiral staircase curled like a strand of seaweed into the cold room of vaults, the heavy thud of door distinct as your sadness following us everywhere. There, you turn over the bundle of letters in your hand like unbelievable money. “I’m so tempted to read them,” you say. You want her back, the feisty and independent one, the one who could, at eighty, do ten knee bends in aerobics class, dance a smooth jitterbug and shuttle like the tide to and from the house about her business. Not this Elizabeth you mourn, the one who can no longer reason, who points and giggles at fat people and smells, sometimes, like the ocean. Time slides like Dali’s clock. Elizabeth is surprised that she once was married and had a husband, that she once gave birth to sons.

Dear Letters, Fond Letters, Must I with you part? You are such a source of joy To my lonely heart. Sweet Letters, Dear Letters, What a tell you tell; O, no power on earth can break This strange mystic spell! Dear Letters, Fond Letters, You my secret know— Don’t you tell it, any one— Let it live and grow.

I would give my husband drawings for grocery lists, with smiling faces on the eggs, and spider feet dangling everywhere. I could draw letters too. fat senseless alphabets, lexical landscapes of pointed trees and bloated clouds. that is how I wished words were, with changing colours and feathers in their spines. on road signs in my dreams, they shimmied, their Rockette heels a variegated sunburst. unlike the stiff black knots and stakes that glared at me from envelopes and books. an unchanging and cruel exotica, like smelling Cuban cigars wherever you go or the same screaming opera. he said that I did not need to learn with him there, reading slowly aloud, but sometimes in silence. that drove me insane, he would laugh or frown at something on the page, and look as if he were a creeping vine on a tombstone, a coffee stain on a piece of clean manilla. I practice learning on a stack of mail he kept in his sock drawer, and I finally learned dear. Dear Hank, it felt like having a perfume sample fall from a magazine in a sweet sudden breath. it made me think of velvet antlers, of his rumpled cardigan sweater and my love for him, a word which slayed me, with its clean lines and quick exhalation, the swelling heart in its middle. I began to scream things all day long, and I felt the first affection for poetry through the ringing sounds of advertisements, soapbox labels and advice to the lovelorn columns. words were heroic, huge killing things, and they beat in my head and bled from my eyes and fingers. I would be ironing, and a giant phrase or comma would barrel into the room, its veins bulging, its arms around my waist. Dear Hank, I miss you especially your sexy hands, mine clenched when I got that far and then some. then I knew for sure that reading was magic, it conjured up these long eyelashes and white Harlow hair, and the guilty baldspot and shaking dewlap of my faithless husband, adrift on the libretto of his private life. he would still read to me in his annoying way while I squirmed on my novels and texts, that lay under the couch cushions like misplaced scissors. I drew him an elaborate list one day, of pink champagne bottles and support girdles, and wrote my first words. I left them with his letters, on the back of our marriage certificate, I think they were my finest, I said, Dear Hank, the end. and right away began working on a longer book.

When I stood behind his desk chair and when he sat, on rare occasions, on the porch, “sage of Anacostia,” they called him, I smelled his mane glorious, and as a hand saddle the aroma of hair took me to neckline and below. In Egypt, long after Napoleon had shot off the face of the Sphinx, I thought of this man, and the cusp of his palms on my shoulder blades; as always he was carrying the mail of gender, his touch immaculate in the true blend of the cortex, and of the complex, risen on a pulpit, and after the hot air, wintry parlance, the syllables of my name in his ear, when he touched me, as he had touched me then. I had my suspicions of English ladies, actresses, ghosts of the Thames, concubines, as we had been into this next century. And they had their wiles with him. I do not feel forbidden; the cameo ring he gave me, recession of his maleness all I need, and highlights of my dark profile, any children we might have had buried in architecture, and the hate of his daughter Rosetta, who I have spoken to over the grate. The sun rises and sets in our neighborhood: I WILL BURN THESE. But when I place my fingers in that mane it is to the saddle he will come.

It lies in our hands in crystals too intricate to decipher It goes into the skillet without being given a second thought It spills on the floor so fine we step all over it We carry a pinch behind each eyeball It breaks out on our foreheads We store it inside our bodies in secret wineskins At supper, we pass it around the table talking of holidays and the sea.

Between the hands, between the brows, Between the lips of Love-Lily, A spirit is born whose birth endows My blood with fire to burn through me; Who breathes upon my gazing eyes, Who laughs and murmurs in mine ear, At whose least touch my colour flies, And whom my life grows faint to hear. Within the voice, within the heart, Within the mind of Love-Lily, A spirit is born who lifts apart His tremulous wings and looks at me; Who on my mouth his finger lays, And shows, while whispering lutes confer, That Eden of Love's watered ways Whose winds and spirits worship her. Brows, hands, and lips, heart, mind, and voice, Kisses and words of Love-Lily,— Oh! bid me with your joy rejoice Till riotous longing rest in me! Ah! let not hope be still distraught, But find in her its gracious goal, Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought Nor Love her body from her soul.

Love lives beyond The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew— I love the fond, The faithful, and the true Love lives in sleep, 'Tis happiness of healthy dreams Eve’s dews may weep, But love delightful seems. 'Tis seen in flowers, And in the even's pearly dew On earth's green hours, And in the heaven's eternal blue. ‘Tis heard in spring When light and sunbeams, warm and kind, On angels’ wing Bring love and music to the wind. And where is voice, So young, so beautiful and sweet As nature’s choice, Where Spring and lovers meet? Love lives beyond The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew. I love the fond, The faithful, young and true.