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

Forgetting to remember your scent, they are forgetting to

Remember your name, so I will walk, and I will climb, and I will drive, so that your picture does not fade

Gas stations during road trips Are in between places, they are The Bermuda Triangles of our Roads,

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 what age, what decade marker her Little girl reached.

Was your Kindness smothered in cruelty? Your daughter calls you every day, Very well knowing the ringing will go unanswered

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

On your own at 8:30 p.m. but your Mother knew, all mothers know The movements of their children, their Mirrored movements play out within

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

There was no pot of gold at the end of this Multicolored brilliance,

The only thing on her body Were silver circlet earrings Which were unable to ward Away the monster that killed Her

And so what good is checking on your neighbors if you are unwilling to save Them?

If someone is holding a match to Strings that explode, are they Truly innocent?

In a shallow grave. Your skin smelled of oranges, bright And warmed by the sun, streaks of luminous hair Blemished by earth, tainted by the touch of someone Who did not love you.

You left your room that night, and no One knows how you died. Was it a siren’s Call or a serpent’s spell?

begging please find my Small town girl, wondering if those who know More have driven past your picture and smiled

reports have sprung up Weeds, of seeing the older woman out and About searching for her family to take her Back to her real home

Images cannot show you graceful Beneath the water.

I should have never become clues for you

Gather around The campfire of crimes committed Against children, bodies located an Hour from home, in a place so remote Screams were muffled to those dark Stars.

Shame on Those that cradle those girl’s cries in Their memory.

They were last seen together by the Neighborhood children, sisters walking hand in hand Into the never where, into the never land, and never Have they been seen again, the city yearns to hear Their childhood laughter,

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

for a mother’s intuition twists like bloody blades Within veins,

Time does that, it continues its slow Progression, but you cannot do that, you Are frozen in baby pictures, and are you With your mother?

We worship the death On screen, but need to know more Information, overwhelms about the Programs, but not about you, who Were you?

questions, so Many questions, but if the questions Are all answered they cannot profit From your murder

Can ghosts haunt structures That live only in our memory?

Did you fall like Alice, or were You pushed?

Awful things swim in the

Trunks of cars of strangers

Some friends open the doors to our exit

sometimes a child Heads out the door in that anger, and fades Into a memory.

your family Misses you, and have stitched Together an existence with cracks

with dreams dotted by Lightening bugs,

And grass shot up between her fingers in that time, and rain Fell on her forehead during that time, the same forehead that Had received kisses from her mother,

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

She is not a runaway or any Of those other names that Are said to discredit the value Of their lives, of her life,

it’s Been a decade, and I feel this Cold pressure in my womb Where I grew her,

And now at night when I look Up into the celestial body of Creation I only see darkness

fluttering in the wind like prayer flags, her memory now joined Forever with the missing and murdered, forgotten and ignored, women, Our women, our little girls