at how a person can be so overwritten.

Only what we greatly love or greatly fear

makes us anyone’s, and so I learned

to love and fear my liberators, especially

Aespaneo, a childless woman I called mother,

watching her try to nurse

Mary Ann through the fever I survived. Why else

should I have run upon seeing Lorenzo

years later at the soldiers’ trading post?

My brother, who’d survived and grown, who’d tracked me

through news of us in the markets?

What other reaction would be natural

than flight, seeing the wild blue lights

of his eyes staring out at me from that

unfamiliar face, the long

pale hand stretched out for mine—

Once, my father

warned me of the savagery that churns

inside the heart of nature, the sky

grown so enormous with light

it would take all our strength not to dissolve

inside it. And when I lay down

in Aespaneo’s arms and felt the sweet

stinging ache of fever rush through me,

I thought I understood this wildness, the place

where God’s love spreads as far

as we can imagine, though when my father’s

sickness came upon him, this thinking changed.

It was God’s rage, he said,

that spreads farthest, and it was fear of this

that kept him driving us out into the desert.

I shall take you to the very edge, he’d said,

of what you can withstand, and pain

shall be your freedom.

But when I saw the Yavapai blade

slice my sister’s cheek, I understood pain

was not the edge of mastery or the requirement of freedom

but merely pain; though if pain

accompanied freedom it might have some value to it.

I would be marked, as Mary Ann had been,

and my mother and brothers, by my own hand

or someone else’s. For this reason,

it was easy to lie down and let Aespaneo beard me

in the custom of her nation, as my brother

has written about for the papers, taking my portrait

in his parlor with its rugs

swirled through with chevrons, the fire

dead in his grate, the book he made of my ordeals

tucked upon a shelf. Olive, he tells me now,

if you like, we can have your marks scratched out

of the negative, but to me it makes

no difference. I confess I see only

the tight braids my brother’s maid has bound

to my scalp, the wallpaper with its fists of buds,

its water stain from a summer storm that’s spread

to the shape and size of a body. To the size

almost of Aespaneo, who cried the day the soldiers

came for me, saying she could not bear to lose

another daughter. I think of her

only sometimes as I run my fingers over my face, feeling

the little ridges across my chin like the scar

I traced a final time on Mary Ann’s cheek. Mary Ann,