Traci Brimhall

We can't remember her name, but we remember where we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds. The illiterate owls interrogate us from the trees, and we answer, We don't know. Maybe we named her Dolores, for our grandmother, meaning sadness, meaning the mild kisses of a priest. Maybe we called her Ruth, after the missionary who gave us a rifle and counterfeit wine. We blindfolded our sister and tied her hands because she groped the fence looking for the rabid fox we nailed to a post. Katydids sang with insistent summer urge and the cavalier moon grew more slender. In the coyote hour, we offered benedictions for a child we may have named Aja, meaning unborn, meaning the stillness that entered us, which is the stillness inside the burnt piano, which is also the woman we untie, who is the mother of stillness.

We go to prison windows and pass cigarettes, tangerines and iodine through the bars. Anything we think could heal a man. Assassins kiss our fingers. Mercenaries sing us songs about unbroken light as we mend their shirts. The bilingual murderers recite lamentations in one tongue, and in another, young myths. We fold and unfold our shawls, and the men squint into the sunlight, dumb with hope. Some days they confuse the walls of their cage with their skin. Some days, the sky. They see their deaths in the sweat darkening our dresses. To sweeten the hours we share scandals from the city, how curators removed an elephant's heart from the museum because it began beating when anyone in love looked at it, how the coroner found minnows swimming in a drowned girl's lungs. They ask if it's true, if slaves are chained together on ships to prevent suicide. We say they'll never be free. They warn us one night soon the judge will wake to find his bed alive with wasps, while across town the night watchman will stare stunned at the moths circling before he realizes he's on fire.

In the temple, a pear blackens in a statue's palm. Birds steal the grain. A man climbs the steps holding his severed hand, but no miracle occurs. His body refuses to reach out and claim what it lost. A woman in a white dress waits to be overshadowed as she plucks her eyelashes—one for the horses, one for the rain, one for the hair on the back of her lover's hands. She wants her virtue restored, to return to a morning when her skin was new and unwounded, when her mouth still fit her mother's breast. You came to ask if it's true, if angels weep until their faces become human, and if the dead can escape their tombs, then— You trap wind as it enters the statue's mouth, and command it to rise, walk.

Home, then, where the past was. Then, where cold pastorals repeated their entreaties, where a portrait of Christ hung in every bedroom. Then was a different country in a different climate in a time when souls were won and lost in prairie tents. It was. It was. Then it was a dream. I had no will there. Then the new continent and the new wife and the new language for no, for unsaved, for communion on credit. Then the daughter who should’ve been mine, and the hour a shadow outgrew its body. She was all of my failures, my sermon on the tender comforts of hatred in the shape of a girl. Then the knowledge of God like an apple in the mouth. I faced my temptation. I touched its breasts with as much restraint as my need allowed, and I woke with its left hand traced again and again on my chest like a cave wall disfigured by right-handed gods who tried to escape the stone. It was holy. It was fading. My ring, then, on my finger like an ambush, as alive as fire. Then the trees offered me a city in the shape of a word followed by a word followed by a blue madonna swinging from the branches. A choir filed out of the jungle singing hallelujah like a victory march and it was.

We keep my sister alive by force, pin her down and nurse her with raw eggs from the chickens that did not drown and milk taken from a goat staked to the ground. The dull tolling of the bell around her neck speaks as she moves. Here, I am here. She wanders to the river, and we find her. In a tree, singing to a starling, we find her. We dig a grave for the missing body, but nothing consoles her. In mourning, the cure is the sickness. A year ago, a lion took our mother as she tended the fire. This hunger bewilders me. We found half of her bones and buried her uneaten heart in a dead cub's rib cage. When we returned three days later we saw no bones, no heart, only tracks in the sand leading east.Ghost me. Fossil me. Resurrect me near dawn. We're always at the mercy of one menacing grace, one rite, an art that makes us suffer twice. At night we wait with out knives where the tall grass begins. We will kill it or die or become the lion.