They found her body, pregnant,
plastered inside the basement wall.
Pulver from the job lay witness
inside cracks lining the brick floor.
Bloodstains bloomed as flowers
around the porcelain sink drain;
his knife washed clean of sins.
But screams remain undissolved
as requiem in this altar. No denial
of murder.
She must have been tired
trudging desert with its indifference,
the sand and sagebrush unrelenting,
then rafting through river’s rage at night,
the border beckoning across the Rio Grande,
her bridge to freedom. Stopped
in El Paso to rest. She hid
inside a Texas barn on her way
to a new life. He found her,
her access through cut barbed wire,
followed the telling trail from the fence
to the hayloft.
And coyotes howled into night.
And the Cactus Always Bloom Despite the Thorns