Marilyn Johnston The Unidentified Female The story was on page one of The Oregonian the day after I found myself at State Police, pounding on the door. I must have run through the streets when the man in the blue suit shot the transient after the transient sliced the man above his eye with a knife for taunting him after I pulled out a ten dollar bill from my wallet for the transient who asked for money for his sick child, he said, following my walk to the ATM machine, after I pulled down the shades and locked my office door for the night. My mind like a video on rewind, I retrace memories. Was sucked in trying to believe people are good, life predictable, and that things like this only happen someplace else. A fuzzy scene that cast me as the unidentified female on a day when I hardly recognized myself. Marilyn Johnston was raised in the South, but has spent the past twenty-five years in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry has appeared in Calyx, Clackamas Literary Review, Fireweed, Manzanita: Poetry and Prose of the Mother Lode and Sierra, Artspirit; and other literary journals and several anthologies, including Tcha teemanwi: Poems for Marys Peak. Marilyn was the 1999 winner of the Donna J. Stone National Literary Award for Poetry; and in 2001, she received an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for Poetry and was selected as a Fishtrap Fellow. Marilyn and her family live in Salem, Oregon where she is the Human Rights & Relations Specialist for the City of Salem.