Doe

Aimée Baker

• Publisher: The University Of Akron Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781629220864
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Doe began as Baker's attempt to understand and process the news coverage of a single unidentified woman whose body was thrown from a car leaving Phoenix, Arizona. It soon grew into a seven-year-long project with the goal to document, mourn, and witness the stories of missing and unidentified women in the United States.

"My choice for the award is Doe —that book is so good, so well executed with such difficult subject matter. I admire its active courage, its commitment to witnessing what so many reject. It stayed with me through reading all the others—fantastic books, the lot of them. But Doe is a game changer, a silence eliminator."

—Allison Joseph, 2016 Akron Poetry Prize judge

MISSING

The Abduction Narrative

(Girly Chew Hossencofft, 36, missing since September 9, 1999, from Albuquerque, New Mexico)

1. Capture

On the drive home, she still finds bits of glass incandescent in the stillness of the car. Wind scuttling through a hole in her window, symmetrical like a fist. Again, surrounded by the grey light of her room, she leaves an offering to the goddess of mercy poured from the tap. From behind she cannot see the approach of the other woman whose skin phosphoresces with the waning day. And soon, like some tentacled creature, the woman is everywhere, pulling.

2. Procedure

She once helped a boy create a spaceship from cardboard and duct tape. Smoothed ridges over angles. A thing of industry, now looped around her wrists, pulled tight across lips. It is like this that they examine her body. Leave their mark.

3. Tour

Within a triangle, things are lost. There is a house on the moon where he once told her he has been alive for several thousand years, yet still there was strength in his hands the time he wrapped them around her throat. There is a house where he made love to his creature, her skin glittering under arcs of light. And there is her home, the fiery orange carpet creased with bleach and the goddess of mercy keeping watch.

4. Time

On the road to Magdalena, sound is cyclical. This is how minutes go missing. There is just breathing. The dry sound of gestures. Voices. It is easy to forget what came before: the scent of jackfruit and fig, the weight of air before a monsoon, the electric blue heat that used to be love.

5. Return

The narrative leaves space for her body’s return. A ritual passage from one place to another. The ability to be left with a sense of foreboding. It remains empty.

6. Aftermath

In the distance, like Bengal lights, beams of light flash by on the highways. Incandescent lanes scaling through the sand. Here, the air is cleansed of water. The breeze heavy with iron as the world seems to collapse in on itself. This is the way stars burn out.

Conductance

(Virginia Pictou-Noyes, 26, missing since April 24, 1993, from Bangor, Maine)

The brothers beat love

into her skin under the pulse-electric

hum of the tavern bar sign.

And her body conducts

the static swell of nightair

into the violet bloom of oiled tarmac.

They beat love as blood sparks

across the dark pavement

like small electrodes.

And her body conducts

the cries of children caught in a nightfire

into the stinging bulb of loosened teeth.

They beat love while each man

tells her she is like a hook,

burst deep into their lips.

And her body conducts

the cold yellow moon, nightnicked

into a grid of blood at her wrists.

The brothers beat love into her skin

while the stars die out.

Cynosure

(Mary Shotwell Little, 26, missing since October 14, 1965, from Atlanta, Georgia)

He gives her red roses stripped of thorns, delivered in cellophane that crinkles in her hands while she looks for the note that reads secret admirer.

He gives her his body pressing against hers pressing against her car, his hand cupping her mouth, his voice in her ear asking her if she recalls what it felt like when he ran his fingers down her neck.

He gives her a cheek pressed against dim grey upholstery, her groceries rolling around the backseat clashing into her legs, her scarab bracelet callusing her wrist.

He gives her the sparkle of mile markers, a way to count the distance from her husband’s hands.

He gives her a green sign that announces her hometown, and because the morning sun scorches the letters, she cannot see the name, but she knows where she is, remembers the curvature of the road, the dips and rises that announce lovers’ lanes, the cobbling together of buildings along the skyline.

He gives her the ticking of a streetlight outside a gas station where she gets out to use a restroom while he and an attendant holding a greasy rag watch her stumble in her bare feet, blood twirling around her knees.

He gives her the percussion of rain on her body, the rivulets of water down her collarbone, the float of crisp red leaves against her wrists and across her back, the hush of roadways.

He gives her the joining of body and ground.

Surrender, Dorothy

(Lola Celli, 24, missing since February 23, 1946, from Grandview Heights, Ohio)

The name of the star

was sorrow, but her tongue caught

no dust, no whirling tumbleweeds

stuck deep in her throat.

What if she didn’t want to see

other lands, big mountains, big oceans

except through the glass light beneath

Marvel’s hands?

She wouldn’t have plucked

an apple from beneath

glimmering leaves while a toucan

watched the way her lips

moved over its flesh,

or caressed the locked jaw

of a man without heart

enough not to yield an ax.

When the hand of God

reached to hold her

own, she wouldn’t have fought

with her eyes closed, or slid

off the edge of the screen

into the technicolor spaces

we only see in the poppy-drunk dawn.

She would have left

those ruby red slippers

on the road through the nightmare forest,

evidence that hearts will never be practical,

until they can be made unbreakable.

Dustland Fairytale

(Deanna Michelle Merryfield, 13, missing since July 22, 1990, from Killeen, Texas)

Inside the car she slides against corsages of cigarette smoke and their foxed skin. The one with star-clustered lips kisses her wrist flesh, the blue of veins. She plans a revelation of pierced skin. Holes safety pin deep, rubbed warm with India ink.

They pull through the ruts of the trailer park, the murmur of dust behind them. Door creaking and footsteps the only dark sounds. At her uncle’s she traces hearts on her twin’s window, two unmirrored halves. Tapping on the glass she spells out, “I miss you...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Missing
• Unidentified
• Notes
• Acknowledgments