Our Victim

124 STEPHANIE FORD OUR VICTIM Ancestor of no one, claimless and under all weathers, I elect myself heiress to these green glints of bottle glass, to the loose-knit zeros inscribing their pulse across the expanding flats. The unsung self takes seed in such badlands, in a soil of shed wings and spent ammunition. When night calls me in, I tether my silence to stars and star lichens, entertain the specimens of frontier dread— an ankle bone dredged from a stream bed, our victim suspected of living alone, of paying her debts to the torched plateau, of hearing the gun-range calliope keening the ballad of nobody’s home. ...