I must tell you a story my child,
of a Black undocumented girl 

who finds herself on the high plains
of Wyoming. In a bag she brings

with her from home she carries bug spray
and mosquito repellent, for when she journeys 

through the sage of the short prairie grass.
She sprays it on her feet first, then her soles, 

dusted by the red dirt near the tipi circles.
Then she spreads the oil from the repellant

on her skin, tone, a mixture of sienna and copper,
a bit shy of the rust in the dust of earth.

She finds a creek, which she had known
to be a tributary of something larger than 

an offering, she watches how
it empties itself into a vessel filled with rocks, 

weeds & purple grass which calls it mother.
She smiles at the yellow warbler floating 

its feet in the warm side of the water
like it had never licked water, like a school 

girl waiting for her father to take her home.
In this creek she finds first a raccoon 

that grabs a rainbow trout by the neck
and snaps off its head to nibble on its neck:

neither afraid to be pricked by its spine
or understood by a coyote. If this Black girl 

were not afraid of the high-pitched hymns
of the song dog, she would have walk 

up to it and said hello
Will you let me live?

but she sits at the hands of the creek
and watches the critter eat and eat 

until her eyes welt from the howling.
That a racoon could eat first before an undocumented

Black girl could think of becoming a citizen
baffles me. She realizes a slither:

a rattlesnake or a bull snake.
A Black undocumented girl is not Eve 

yet she knows the difference: a rectangular head,
a narrow body, a threatened tail and glistening fangs.

She speaks in rhymes. They both bob their heads
to the melody. She sings just in case she is afraid. 

All but an immigration officer has appeared
to the Black undocumented girl 

so they meet at the fork of the road
where the left leads to a pile of sand

and the right leads to mounds of anthills
and refugees begging to love this country. 

He notices how she carries her left feet
and where it would lead her 

but she is undocumented so any path
will lead to overthinking.

For mercy’s sake she’s a Black undocumented
girl in Wyoming. Like wet grass on a hill she sits,

then she sees what could be Eden
sage to the left, sage to the right 

-she picks and grinds them on her teeth-
sage to revive memories of women hawking tigernuts,

a pre-waking, pre-airplane, pre-someone
telling her she can’t go home,

like a thought waiting to be realized
she lights herself to steps of a black bear 

and her cubs, her eyes clean, as an immigration
stamp. The door of earth left ajar, as the lip 

of a cow ready to triturate. It cannot contain
a girl and the smoke that drives the lost home.