for Amy Fitzpatrick
I.
A photo starts the hunt for the missing.
In the depths of winter, harvest mice court warmth from last season’s dead.
Safe in the darkness of their nests, high from danger on the ground.
Experience is always partial. In this story we remember
the forgotten as morning mist, a goose-pimpled embrace.
So dry here. The man-carved mountains, half developed then abandoned.
Rocks skitter down like animals let loose.
And too many holes in this.
I’m not the unreliable narrator.
II.
Lorca wrote, In Spain, the dead are more alive
than the dead of any other country in the world.
A girl crosses perpetually in the valley between mountains,
wildflowers grow where she once walked.
The newspapers dig out trenches to bury ourselves in.
She disappeared, then there were posters.
In this story I tell you about the memory of a memory
of a girl I knew as a child.
III.
The cats outside sound hurt, their life-making mews like the dead.
But each morning they lie alive, sprawled on the sun-baked ground.
In Andalucía, what we cannot see is also what cannot be said.
Saffron and paprika spiced rice. The post-firework smell of New Year’s Day.
Where is the black box? Rumours swell like rivers
and the questions are lynxes stalking.
In my chest live songbirds, pecking at the ribs that cage them.
A break-in, a laptop taken, her left behind phone stolen.
IV.
In this story survives an unfulfilled elegy.
The flowers wilted waiting for a service.
Places the missing have been found: water tanks, pregnant on a mountaintop,
a raft at sea half-dead, the Cave of Swimmers.
At the end of the day, there’s not much between myth and legend,
not much difference between two girls with blue eyes and brown hair.
Later, her brother is stabbed to death in Dublin.
Later, her mother marries the man accused of holding the knife.
V.
January, the most juvenile month, fluxes.
This, then, is where it all begins.
A person holds the truth in a glass of water,
tension all that sits between brimming lip and air.
Then, all I knew of step-parents was what I’d read in fairy tales.
Then, all I knew of loss was replacement.
I remember a girl who sat beside me in school.
I’m Amy. I’m new too. I don’t like it here, she said.
