Into the Forest and all the Way Through

by Cynthia Pelayo

I have spent my nights with missing and murdered women, over one hundred of them. I have invited them into my home and my heart.

Before you continue into the forest I leave you with a few more thoughts — we are living with a silent crisis, the crisis of missing and murdered women in our society.

I cannot stress this enough — someone knows something.

Justice sometimes takes time, but it is possible.

when you hear her voice you spin around and gain all the terror she holds, before you there, a girl who no longer is a girl a girl who is bone and moss leaves tangled within her eye sockets stretched down to her finger bone

I reached my fingertips into the breeze hoping to brush against your hair you were not there you are not here

I am forgetting your scent they are forgetting to remember your name I will walk I will climb I will drive so your picture does not fade

this one and only cord my only connection to you to tell you I am home I am safe

Gas stations during road trips are in between places, they are the Bermuda Triangles of our roads, points of fatigue, and cool air, and yellow headlights gasoline pumps, windshields caked in flying insects, and oil stains.

for while she was not a little child she was a child her child, and in the contours of the face of an older woman she could see the full, fat cheeks of her once baby, her forever baby, no matter the age

the remains. The things they call us after we were flesh and blood, remains, What remains.

“Be at the deathbed…I will give you the honest answers you want to hear”

the only thing on her body were silver circlet earrings which were unable to ward away the monster that killed her

what good is checking on your neighbors if you are unwilling to save them?

I should have never become clues for you

It remains a mystery, they say but there is no mystery when someone knows, and others won’t speak,

Shame on those that cradle those girl’s cries in their memory. Bookshelves now tell of their suffering

into the never where, into the never land, and never have they been seen again,

So many men say they do not know what happened to the now missing women who were once under their care.

It is fleeting, and the night is an origami figure, a contortionist, bending into itself.

Your murder as reality show crime scene, crime news, crime cruises, but has anyone solved the crime? We worship the death on screen, but need to know more information, overwhelms about the programs, but not about you, who were you? Show me more, the fields the killing fields, where your head ached, and your body slumped kidnapped and decomposed, human fertilizer, harsh isn’t it?

so many questions, but if the questions are all answered they cannot profit from your murder

and if there’s anyone who could know how to spin a lie how to weave a web, hide a body, it would be someone who dances with the law

some friends open the doors to our exit

perhaps she speaks to you from the dusted memories of those documents you hold,

Your children said you had the intensity of an amusement park,

a private investigator could find almost any brilliant star but he could not spot yours in the dark sky, when you decided not to wait, and instead walk, maybe hitchhiked into a constellation

when this many women go missing in such a place, someone knows something, there are whispers and looks, nods of knowing, so tell me, what happened to her?

Island girls. Blessed by the sun and damned by everything in between.

High-risk, that’s what police call it when they insinuate your murder was meant to be, justified,

the destination was hiking, outdoors and mountaineering that Jack Kerouac wrote about, in a place hundreds of miles away in Whatcom County, Washington,

and what was the point in extinguishing a life that was not yours,

a living, pinned butterfly, brightly colored and fluttering beneath a hold.

and there was no more life worth living when so much had been taken for perhaps just a few moments of violation, I can’t think about this anymore, so let’s have another drink.