at sleeves and hem, the silks

which hissed whenever I walked—

Without a mirror, I might forget

why I inspire crowds to gather: my marks

have eroded only to marks,

curlicues of smoke beside the scar

I still remember raised

along my sister Mary Ann’s cheek.

Cut with a knife by a Yavapai

during our struggle, Mary Ann was the one

who bore pain without crying. Sister,

she soothed me as I stanched the blood,

beside all the things we’ve lost, what now

is a cut? She was right:

what we’d lost was greater, yet harder, too,

to imagine. The red threads webbing

our mother’s eyes. And how our father stared,

unblinking, down the valley’s desiccated length

in the hope of finding his family

its promised home. In truth, we’d run into trouble

long before the Yavapai attacked,

my father having prepared for our journey

poorly, so that after a week we’d eaten

through our supplies, then split the last

of our water barrels. Two of our cattle died.

And then my father himself succumbed

to those fits of weeping prayer that led us first

out into the desert, where my six siblings learned

to catch desert grouse, and I lanced the heart-

colored cactus flowers like boils

for water. Mary Ann said it was our father’s burden

to lead, ours to follow: only in our suffering

would God’s truth in him be revealed. What truth I know

is how we clung to each other, hearing the cries

circling our fires, watching Lorenzo,

our youngest brother, clutch a knife and claim he’d kill

any Indian who came near.

The desert night grew chill, a white sun rose, and the rest

has been written about in the papers.

But of all these things, it is my face

about which strangers wish to hear, and not

how we walked past the bodies

of our parents, our siblings—people we recognized

but had no relation to: Mary Ann and I

tied, and taken as slaves until

some passing group of Mojave, taking pity on us,

purchased our freedom. For the next eight years,

we lived with them. But why

had we let ourselves be marked

like them, why lie still for the quill

struck repeatedly into our chins, its sting

of coal smuts scrubbed into our welts?

Once I thought these filigrees

had always existed inside us, showing

the pattern from which we were made: not a new

version of ourselves but the original, as if

we, too, were composed of our father’s

weakness and belief. But Mary Ann said they were signs

only of a willingness to live: we could not be

accountable for our appearance here,

she said, nor more truly

each other’s sister, for now

our resemblance to each other had been made

complete. Still, when I pass the sudden

shock of a mirror, or finger the black

rise of skin on skin, I am amazed anew