Turning to watch you leave,
I see we must always walk toward

other rooms, river of heaven
between two office buildings.

Orphaned cloud, cioppino poppling,
book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light.

I think it is all right.
Or do tonight, garden toad

a speaking stone,
young sound in an old heart.

Annul the self? I float it,
a day lily in my wine. Oblivion?

I love our lives,
keeping me from it.

^{Gettysburg National Military Park}

Motorcycles and white tour vans speed 
between behemoth granite shafts, shove
my body by their force, leave me roadside
and wandering fields. Little is funny
when you’re Chicana and walking 
a Civil War site not meant for walking.
Regardless, I ask park rangers and guides 
for stories on Mexicans soldiers,

receive shrugs. No evidence in statues 
or statistics. In the cemetery, not one 
Spanish name. I’m alone in the wine shop. 
It’s the same in the post office, the market, 
the antique shop with KKK books on display.
In the peach orchard, I prepare a séance,
sit cross-legged in grass, and hold
a smoky quartz to the setting sun.  

I invite the unseen to speak. So many dead, 
it’s said Confederates were left to rot. 
In war, not all bodies are returned home 
nor graves marked. I Google “Mexicans 
in the Civil War” and uncover layers 
to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 
and Cinco de Mayo. This is how I meet 
ancestors for the first time, heroes 

this country decorates in clownish sombreros 
and fake mustaches, dishonors for fighting 
European empire on shared American land 
Power & Money dictate can’t be shared. 
Years before this, carrying water gallons 
up an Arizona mountain ridge to replenish 
supplies in a pass known as “Dead Man’s,” 
I wrote messages on bottles to the living, 

scanned Sonoran canyons for the lost,
and knew too many would not be found. 
A black Sharpie Virgen drawn on hot plastic 
became a prayer: may the next officer halt 
before cracking her face beneath his boot,
spilling life on to dirt. No, nothing’s funny
when you’re brown in a country you’re taught 
isn’t yours, your dead don’t count.

^{for Bessie Stringfield}

You said you took God with you to all 48 states.

You caroled your grief on an Indian Scout,

rode your Harley until the crowd forgot it was a motorcycle,

saw a stallion riding the track wall,

breaking for a field’s freedom.

You wanted a story you could tell

about surviving America on two wheels,

six years too early for the Green Book.

But I understand leaving.

I’ve been looking

                          to see the world.

We cross under
the midnight shield
and learn that bullets

can curse the air.
A symposium
of endangered stars

evicts itself to
the water. Another
convoy leaves the kiln.

The crowded dead
turn into the earth’s
unfolded bed sheet.

We drift near banks,
creatures of the Mekong,
heads bobbing like

ghosts without bodies,
toward the farthest shore.
With every treading

soak, the wading leg,
we beg ourselves to live,
to float the mortared

cartilage and burial
tissue in this river yard
of amputated hearts.