Into the Forest and all the Way Through

by Cynthia Pelayo

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 pointing above and pointing you out where you climb against rock and stone she bids you farewell begging you, pleading you make it safe, all the way home

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

not until a teacher found chemical burns on my skin that I could finally tell the story of the little sister I had and the demons who threw her away and told me never to tell

Now those three children know the way of questions, and the emptiness of answers, and the disappointment that when the doorbell rings or when the phone vibrates in their hand it is never their mother

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

It remains a mystery, they say but there is no mystery when someone knows, and others won’t speak, and all that is left of this investigation

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

Case status: Unsolved

SOLVED

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

a mother’s intuition twists like bloody blades within veins.

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

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