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By the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone.

My mother had good hair, a term she would never use herself because, she said, it was so hurtful she couldn’t possibly believe it. But my mother’s hair was undeniably long and thick, a mass of loose curls that Callie and I did not inherit and that she was determined to cut off before we began our new life.

She tried to talk both of us into joining her, but only Callie took the bait. My mother got her with the promise of hair made so easy and simple, you could run your fingers through it. When it was all over, Callie was left with an outgrowth of stiff, sodden curls that clung in limp clusters to her forehead and the nape of her neck and made the back of her head smell like burning and sugar.

In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants,

the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case

of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind.

He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope,

the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago

love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks.

His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange

to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street

in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower

the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph

languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind

into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand

brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There,

the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting

a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O,

around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs

through the road. The road which runs through

the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother

only in that she is a story the Archivist tells

himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree,

two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting.

The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history.

Of course, the village burns again. History is

the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter

is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live!

The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.

There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.

The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking

brushes the air between us like a wet mark

stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead

twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.

Robyne, who, when someone hurls 

toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.

My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins

I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.

In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons.  They closed over the sky like an eyelid.