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A family becomes fossilized—a darker crosshatch etched in hard sand.

The year we left the reservation a white boy gave me a trash bag.

Come winter, they go to the funeral early & count the living.

Having held down the past applying pressure to its sacrum . . .

Stocking shelves, like serving, is a job that will not let go of your mind.

He was caught. Of course he was caught. He was always caught.

I know what it means to be born in one life and meant for another.

The judge’s mother was impossible; her mere presence was infuriating.

We work to house the water yet know we cannot keep anything.

Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help.

When the thugs from the bank showed, up my father laughed.

Claim to be Choctaw or Cherokee. Claim to be a princess too.

You are the only one who knows not to pour water on the flame.

I only divine the cat’s location when I hear its small cough.

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.

It had always been this way. Mothering, for my mother, was a cameo role.

My brush dissects her slick-back black hair to expose ugly white.

I can only say I am here searching solo for remnants of Seoul Drive

She sits in her wax like a candle. A woman comes, a woman goes.

There’s something I saw at the race meeting I can’t figure out.

It was an act that made me feel safer but also somehow more imperiled.

The ashes of a human being are not ash. The body burns into wood.

It lay slumped where they’d dragged it, a fright of an animal.

A knife left by an untraced foot marks where to lay the body—fácil.

Together we invented intimacy, both its benefits and its horrors.

Her body is no longer the source of pleasure but constant pain.

All her sisters have gone to bed, dreaming dreams not like the wakeful.

The scent of lighter fluid and tobacco drifted in through the window.

Let those shadows sift the spirits of their children from the silt.