There was a voice calling in the night from the tin
behind the glass. The receptionist noted the sound
of cicadas circling the women’s bathroom. Cylinder,
cicada, legs moving round and round through a brass-
colored mouth.

The moon said, Look, shiyazhí
                 in so many words suddenly remembered.
How to understand with so many voices
                 scattered to the sea? Flat glass, laser-protected
mahogany drawers. The custodian was scared

of Indian ghosts in the half-light
                 through the window, how the cylinders
looked like cedar trunks. Every night
                 the voice would not stop singing
as he defogged his windshield and zig-zagged home.

The pattern trickled
                 after him, out the front entrance.
I can’t say anything new
                 about her— she knows herself and her path
home— that desert emerald, eye-socket
                 of a sow skull. There are only one hundred
reruns in a body, the body a weapon
                 when it sings. To unravel, like the sun, which rotates
very slowly and spills itself along, I speak back
to the voice.

I tell her a story. Shimá,
                 I call her— a woman remembering her place
among the stars. The voice will never be lost
                 while constellations
pulse against the sheaths of glass. Come home,
                 scattering
in our language full of light.