Sonnet for Dora, Albuquerque, ca. 1995

He dragged your grandmother to the market place
the man, grandfather, with ice in his voice.
"They act like he's a hero," you told me once
when we saw his photograph and his gang
proudly displayed in the conference hall.
Gray-haired, lonely, mourning ghosts, you recall
the crime in the car near church and tremble
with a question to God you never sang.
In the high desert sun, when dogs don't dream,
he pulled her by the hair through cactus and dust,
another man's fish swimming in his stream,
and opened her throat with a knife and threat
that made the town deaf to a woman's blood,
the fear that entombs what shame can't forget.