for missing First Nations women
This is a canvas of blood —

A hazy procession of the baited.
The earth is asleep.

The sky is awake.
And the wind leaves behind 

the awful heaviness of bodies.
Hoofbeats sprout curses — crisp, greaseless.

The song across rooftops is a wild conflation of grisly wrongs.
I’ll tell you a lie that you can believe, like a noose of braided black hair:

 Life made me meager with the dementia of police reports.
There are too many to count.

Too many to hold meaning in my mind.
The scientific impossibility of my worth,

a raging debate.
My name is Missing Red.

My name is Never Found Red. 
My name is Foul Play Suspected Red.

My name is Charges Have Not Been Filed Red. 
My name is Unsolved Red.

I am a many-peopled fringe of red.
My mother’s name is Requiem For the Almost Dead Red.

She is borrowed and cranky like the ideology of skin.
Her lunar voice is unencumbered due to re-education —

The shove, aim, jab — the scar and the shiver of empire.
My daughter’s name is Empire Red. I would feed my bones to the sky

for the cause of her having room to swing her arms.
My son’s name is Second Stardust Red.

I would pry out my teeth if he wanted to pearl a necklace with them.
We come from proud people who refuse to be silenced.
My father’s name is a bottle — neck of glass,

the rigor and clank of children spilled carelessly.
His lunar voice is unencumbered due to re-education — 

The shove, aim, jab — the scar and the shiver of empire.
We come from people who know we belong to each other.
The encyclopedia of weapons we hold is not
 
and is exactly what makes us a family. 
The red dichotomy — a catechism of survival,
 
a shallow pulse. And why can’t we save each other?
Like me, there is an invisible place inside the wet, gray mess of you —
 
a swirl of displaced platelets recalling the delineation of the most hated. 
The quick relief of the penultimate.
 
The triangulation of escape.
When you are black and crossing the border to Canada, you are not as black
 
as the burnt rice at the bottom of a pot that only poor people name and still eat.
When you are black and crossing the border to Canada,

you are not randomly selected before everyone, not every one.
This is the benediction of effort and resignation.
This is what time does while you are waiting for your child to return
 
to the territory of your womb.
This is the pelt of empathy you peel back —
 
The red thread underneath — thick like a wolf’s fur and impenetrable.
There are spirits here in need of pruning — 
Offender known to victim red. Acquittal red.

Abduction red. Former intimate partner red.
Suspicious circumstances red.

Body not found red.
I come from a people known for surviving one hundred kinds of violence, every single one named after a woman, or girl, or wife, or mother, or lost or invisible.

Reach inside your nuclei with your fisting hand until you find the animal mark

your mother left there like a spinning grenade.
Count the ways she failed you, while your father failed her.

Count the ways like names:
Halina Red, Rispah Red, Jesokah Red, Ruby Red, Delia Red, Isobel Red, Jade Red, Norma Red, Precylla Red, Yasmin Red, Elva Red, Elisapi Red, Sinah Red, Dawn Red, Rose Red, Grayce Red, Lorna Red, Nadine Red.

There are hundreds of unnamed legions.
Remember me.

Remember me.