Into the Forest and all the Way Through

by Cynthia Pelayo

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. There are thousands of missing women in America. There are thousands of women who have been murdered, yet their case has gone ignored, forgotten, cold. For women of color, this is especially an epidemic. Hispanic, Black, Asian, and particularly Native American women go missing at much higher rates than the general population, and someone knows something.

These women deserve rest and peace, and the people that took them away from us deserve to be punished.

what good is checking on your neighbors if you are unwilling

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

your own father, 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

she always said “Mommy, I’m going to give you the stars,” and I would say “No mí hija, tu eres mi estrella” and now at night when I look up into the celestial body of creation I only see darkness