Poem by Victoria Buitron
Content warning: death/missing women
Let’s drive by the
murderer’s house,
his steely mustang’s
ribs stick out, a rampike
through skin.
No trespassing signs
on skull-soaked grass,
nine bodies in search of
a teal-eyed one,
a woman missed first,
then missing.
Never deemed missing if
they are past runaways
with a record of mugshots or
with tired half-moon neck
tattoos etched on skin
darker than honey.
It takes cherry-blonde hair
and an online travel-lover
presence, photogenic selfies
with sham smiles to become
the only missing woman in the
United States. Her body is home
now, just not all of last year’s 268,884
missing women and girls whose pictures were
never shown on the six, eight, eleven o’clock news.
Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator whose work delves into the intersections of identity and place, family history, and the moments her hippocampus refuses to forget. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong en Español, JMWW, The 2021 Connecticut Literary Anthology, and other literary magazines. A Body Across Two Hemispheres, which narrates her search for home between Ecuador and Connecticut, is her debut memoir-in-essays and winner of the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize.
Image by Aleks Dorohovich
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