Catalog

Her clicking pen a nervous habit
responding to the inventory
bagged and tagged
from the desert,
every wallet and blanket gathered,
fields of backpacks
abandoned, footprints vanishing
over the ridge.

Stacked in the morgues
there is no counting
ghost bones picked
white around the border.
She searches for the names
trailed off among
bleached rocks and cacti:
one may be a tía, a tío.

The pain of an invisible line
that may have been
a few miles back
the whole time.
In the warehouse
the volunteer sweats,
clicking for the ones she knows.

In the depths and dips
of high desert,
in the name
of survival and hope, she prays
to the patron saint
of slim chances.