Bread and Bread

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...

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 promise...