everything else is salvageable

1.

The girl who learned to shoplift

from her mother

builds websites for old family photos:

Here is the alcoholic grandfather

and the aunt with pancreatic cancer

and that Christmas everyone posed

with faces as serious as the 19^th century.

Digitization as affirmation—

her story will not be stolen.

2.

The archivist’s friend was stabbed

leaving a piano concert at 23.

Her blood slick black in the dim parking lot.

The man moved on to guns

and the archivist nursed

a fear of flickering street lamps.

3.

The child who fled his empty house

for the thrum of the street

stabs a man in prison

but sends his daughter to college

and watches her fall

from an airplane, holds his breath

until her parachute opens. She flies

toward him, a nylon flower

billowing behind her.

4.

The ex-gang member considered

his past a fading tattoo

until old enemies came for his son.

The boy’s headstone shows him stone-faced;

the cursive promises his smile broke

all sadness.

5.

It’s no epiphany,

the forever of death—

so think instead

about the many lives

contained in one life.

The endless branches

of a family tree,

the breaking and the blooming.

Use that pain like a soft

old rag. Polish and pivot.

Bind a wound. Wring it out

and rest and start again.