Behind my grandfather’s farm, past the trampled shed
where goats answer to their name, past the dead branch
grave-crosses marking the cars pulled over
the path’s raw edge into the mountain’s molars,

past the two wooden cow gates where, in the yolk of night,
my uncle swears he met the devil dressed as a white heifer,
the graven road claws the earth to where my great aunts lived alone.

Abuela Martha married my grandfather
after waiting fifty years for his first wife to die,
Lucrecia became the land,
and Graciela, tucked next to her sister,
still hasn’t grown grass over her wound.
Georgina must still hear the hacienda sing:

Still the blond lapdog herding pigs, yawping through dust released
by trotting hooves. Still the mute farm hand tearing manzanos
from their bunch so my brother and I can share a snack.

Still the brindle mutts howling from the tallgrass
after killing a rat for their pups stowed inside a dried tree stump.
The echoes of dancing from my baptism party, my grandparents’ wedding,

on the empty Ecuavoley court. Blood bruising concrete,
the shaking of Chiclet boxes my cousins and I sold
during cock-fighting matches before we understood that life stains.

And at night, as she closes
the mosquito net around her,
the folds in the fabric sifting
moonlight must make the three
cold beds look like they’re breathing
to the sound of the broken typewriter
in the rafters still clacking its missing keys.

—Kaylee Salazar

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