If death is the soul opening a final door,
I don’t know which keys are tucked
in my mind’s back pocket.

Maybe it’s my birth, where I’m blue-dusted
and placed over my mother’s ribs. The blood
of her body still beating into mine,
life’s large weight

braced, still. First breath like a terrier
tunneling to rats, like two matchheads
pressing their foreheads together.
Air burning ablaze. Death reclassified.

Or, Ecuador—
August like a hand on the back of my neck,
my brother and I forever trekking up mountain chin
to find our huerta. The cows let out to graze have maps
on their flanks, are decent at directions, so—

trees in abundance, papayas and tamarillos,
sugarcane flesh chewed, sucked, spat out.
Always this: backs against the bark
of an orange tree older than us, watching
the sun slip behind the peaks like our machete
into its sheath, pith under nails, juice-sticked
mouths, the fruit around us glowing warm gold.

Maybe I’m not given entry,
forced to cling to the doorframe
of my childhood bedroom, watch

the mound of blankets shiver
from the child crying underneath.
Soft begging almost a prayer,
for someone to come in and hold her,
rock her to sleep.

I once got too high and thought I was dying.
In the passenger seat watching city roads melt
into night as my soul lifted out of my body
like a tissue caught in a gust. Convinced

I was in a nursing home,
canula and IV drip, dementia
finally having me, my mind
letting me remember the weight
of my lover’s hand in my palm
before beaming me up.
All I could say was
I love you, I love you, I love you.

And what is the soul?
Is it the spirit or lives decanted into the pitcher
of the body? An endless chain of hand holding wrist,
hand holding wrist.

Lord, you’ve given me
too many people to carry.

You've given me a fishing net with a hole,
and I’m scared of fish, but I’m trying to hold
all the slippery, flippering bodies. All scales

and gills fanning open, close. I hate this
uncertainty. I don’t want a lifetime
to know what—who—I am made of:

chicken feathers stick into the wood slats
of the patched coop, and it’s my father
rinsed clean by youth. His first job
on the farm. Huddled in the corner,
he’s holding the naked blade
of a kitchen knife. The family

needs a bird for dinner, but he won’t,
not this time, because the clucking
and crowing sounds like human crying.
It’s too much, and he can’t help
but think there’s more than this,
surely there’s more than this.

Or the world drowned in desert dust,
sand like poppers the wind whips
into skin. The orange sky unblinking,
lower than usual, all iris rays
watching my grandmother

behind a hill, hands and knees,
head pressed into the ground.
The coyote abandoned her three
miles before the Mexican border.

Dress pockets full of lint,
two stale tortillas, and a pink gumball.
Alone and waiting, waiting, waiting

inside the slipping stream of hourglass silt.
And what of my mountains?
Maybe death will be another crest
on the Andes’ frozen waves. Take
me back to where life started,

where rivers flowing from melted
peaks is a map for my body’s veins.
I want to be my country—
tall, thick-necked, a rhapsody
in red, blue, yellow.

Please—not a boat tilting back and forth,
sea-spray cologne, Spaniards stepping
onto this loved land like static-stuck air,

my people seeing boats on the horizon
like stitches coming undone, the last time
sky and sea held each other. I feel it all.

—Kaylee Salazar

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