Bread and Bread

the boy with the girl's name, had been able to follow his father from house to house  to White House he would have said Stop, look at me — and presented his face, still made of newborn clay, but already hinting at the fullness of humanity: furrowed brow, bowed lips, eyes watching his parents' every move. If Nevada Alexandra's eyes had been given the gift of time, they would have settled into a mirror of his father's: cash-green, with flecks of darkness. Nevada Alexandra listened from the womb  as his father spat out his own father's words and then ran from them. Safe inside his mother,  Nevada Alexandra gave her the gift of grief, bits of genetic code lodged in her bloodstream forever, tasting like ache and impossibility. She broke, forever— or so she would have said, but he saw her grow into a twisted vine. Nevada Alexandra watched over the next baby, a girl with a boy's name, and whispered, Your eyes are your own, and they can change with the light. But Nevada...

Eventually there's only a riddle, the old one about the ax— its head and handle replaced a thousand times. Are you steel, once sharp, now dull? Or are you the thing it splits? Are you the swinging or the replacing? What is the trigger and what is the tragedy? What is the doctor visit and what is the disease? Is the fourth baby you almost adopt an echo of the first three or of the two you never birthed, who would be ten and a half now, but who is counting? Every sad thing deserves its own museum, but every museum has the same glass case, the same new paint smell, the same paper towel vendor Did 13 people die in a mass shooting or were there 13 mass shootings last year or last weekend? Eventually your body becomes a museum of everything that happened and everything that didn't: the sturdy handle of your spine the ghosts of your ovaries the holes filled the way the ocean consumes volcanoes with flat glittering blue Eventually there are no more words or there are only words, it...