Letter to the Disappeared

                        Dear Delphina, Dear Tamara, Dear Nicole,
Did you mean to ghost yourselves
from a dismal broken place when you vanished
along the Yellowhead Highway? Or, maybe
you tried to find your worth somewhere
along that road, a lonely lovely artery feeding
the heart of Canada.
                        Both can be true at once.

                        Dear Tina, Dear Amber, Dear Ramona,
Every translucent cell of your bodies erased—
hair, bone, fingernail—as if

you were scrubbed from this earth.
26, 69, 500…no one counted how many
First Nation women like you

were weighted with stones, wrapped in plastic
and dumped along the shallow
banks of the red
                        Red River near the Winnipeg docks.

                        Dear Angeline, Dear Dawn, Dear Lisa,
No witnesses when you went missing from a motel,
or bus stop on an ordinary rainy street in Vancouver.

No one looked for you because maybe
you were high; selling sex
or having it forced from you. Both
                        can be true at once.

So you vanished again in the metal graveyard
of filing cabinets; death-sleep in manila folders
labeled with a case number. Now
                        you are dots on a map.

                        Dear Disappeared,
Those who remember march in your name;
drag the river, sift through ravines and ditches
deep in the backwoods to find you.
You are gone, and still they search.
                        Everything can be true at once.

Connie Soper has come back to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have recently been published in North Coast Squid, Ekphrastic Review, and Windfall, and are forthcoming in VoiceCatcher, Rain Magazine, and Verseweavers. She divides her time between Portland and Manzanita, OR. She loves and is continually inspired by the time she spends at the Oregon Coast. She writes about other travels as well when there is no pandemic. She misses perusing the poetry section and attending readings at her favorite bookstore, Broadway Books, 1714 NE Broadway, in Portland.