Missing More Than a Word

Someone once asked me, what are the words I do not yet have — 

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verbs that will story our bodies into something more

than missing, more than squaw or lost, beyond statistics:

1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime.

Daily ritual: my hands search and sift through layers

of tiny earthquakes, shifted verdicts not guilty not enough

evidence not prosecutable not our jurisdiction I dig.

Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted

compared to all other races.

I dig. We are vanishing lines in history books, treaties;

laws do not protect us. I dig until mud and earth find home

underneath my fingernails. I’ll plant something new

in the absence burn vanish underreport

Invisible, our ghosts starve, while the rest of the world keeps on eating.

A recent government study found that there were 14 federal human

trafficking investigations in Indian Country between 2013 and

2016. During that same period the FBI investigated 6,100

elsewhere.

Let us poem a place where you cannot erase us into white space.

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Let us dig to remind ourselves our roots are ancestral

and there is nothing deeper

than these sacred, dirt-covered hands.