Remember the thin, fetid mattress you lay on as hunger gnashed in your gut. A voice had whispered your name in the dark. Through the bars of your cell there came a hand, and in the hand, a packet of Ritz crackers.

I don’t expect you to believe me, but my name is Juno Barrios and this is a work of nonfiction.

let’s just try the gate she might be in the backyard

your Nonna opened the gate for us

she was like a human that had been made in half-size a family mascot her eyes and chin a symbol of you

‘Mother, are you drunk already?’ the man asked the woman. He was a man and not a child, she remembered now, watching the hairs of his moustache glisten in the morning sun. She saw that he was holding a child on his hip; a small, watchful child with blonde curls. Her granddaughter.

‘Where did she come from?’ the woman asked.