EIGHT WAYS OF LOOKING AT A MISSING PERSON

by Kenton K. Yee

Alicia Navarro, 18, was said to be upset following an FBI raid on the apartment where she had been living in with an unidentified man in Havre, Montana. —Mail Online, August 1, 2023

after Wallace Stevens

I
In the still, the most moving thing 
is an empty chair.  
 
II
Suspicion spreads like wildfire smoke.
 
Murder and suicide are likely.
Murder, suicide, abduction, and ghosting are likely.   
 
III
What is it that captivates us so, 
the how or the why,
what happened or that it could happen to anyone?
 
IV
Memories of the missing linger
like shadows of headstones on fresh snow.
 
V
I know what the stats say and 
I know you must investigate your leads.
I know, too, that nothing’s as it first appears.
 
So disheveled men in wrinkled suits, 
why do you fixate on the husband?   
Didn’t you watch that movie?
 
VI
[—missing—]
 
VII
People are vanishing, 
some to new identities.    
 
She’s probably cruising Canada in a Mercedes,
missing the little girl and big boy she left behind. 
 
VIII
People vanish and people appear 
like shadows of headstones.
 
Please, at least let your parents know you’re okay.

Author’s Note: The two ongoing news stories about missing young women (Alicia Navarro and Carlee Russell) reappearing—Navarro after 4 years—caused me to think about why we (and the media) are so captivated by missing-person stories. According to the DoJ's NamUS database, over 600,000 US residents go missing every year, which far outnumber the 4,400 unidentified bodies turning up each year. This suggests that most of the missing are either abducted and still alive or running away and adopting new identities of their own volition.

Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Plume Poetry, Threepenny Review, TAB Journal, BoomerLitMag, Sugar House Review, Terrain.org, Rattle, Matter Monthly, Hawaii Pacific Review, and  The New Verse News among others. Kenton writes from Northern California.

WE THE FAMILIES

by Lao Rubert

Photo: GORDON PARKS / GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION accompanying “Becoming a Parent in the Age of Black Lives Matter,” The Atlantic, June 2, 2020.

Today, I join the tribe that lives in fear
of a son traveling the wrong neighborhood,
knowing he will be watched,
viewed with suspicion
his powerful body seen
as threat only, object for capture.

I join the tribe of families
whose sons, husbands, nephews
have been swept up, swept in,
by the machine turning its massive rollers
over their muscular frames.
                                                                     
I join the families saying,
“Take care where
and how you drive your car,
your body
might be too beautiful.
It may frighten them.”                                      

I join families advising, “Think
where to put your hands if stopped.
Though you are quick, make no movements;
though you carry no weapon,
do not open your glove box.
These are things you must know.”

We, the families,                                                          
wait on the courtroom’s hard benches
as officials toss sentences into the air like confetti          
watching as the crane they call justice
swings its giant arm, its heavy bucket        
over the heads of young men forever standing
in the wrong place.

We listen to guards tell our lovely ones    
Where to stand, to sit
when to speak
how their jump suits must be worn,
their pant legs rolled.

We listen to prosecutors
who have no words written
or whispered
about hope
that hummingbird that keeps a young man alive
when trouble comes clanging in over the rooftops.
Where have they hidden it
and why?              

Lao Rubert is a poet and advocate for criminal justice reform living in Durham, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in the N.C. Independent, the Davidson Miscellany, the Duke University Archive, the News & Observer and are scheduled to appear in Barzakh in May, 2020.