In the archives,
I’m buckled.
I want to hear every ghost.

“Miss Joanna Wrigglesworth,
remarkably beautiful corpse.”

What hand wrote that,
and what did it mean?
That even in death,
a woman’s value is how she lies still?

Or maybe the pen trembled with awe.
Maybe the writer loved her.
Maybe beauty bloomed in the face’s final slackness,
like the sudden iridescence
on a Mourning Cloak wing
when the light tilts just so.

“Charles S. Boswell,
killed in a rencounter
by Richard Munson.”

It sounds like a pistol shot,
like men who refused
to see grief as something you walk with
instead of fire at.

“Mr. David Sutton, aged 65,
fell through the trapdoor of a store.”

And isn’t that how it happens?
You’re walking,
then you’re falling,
then the cellar takes you.
Even your sight can’t save you.

“Joseph Breen, Esq., aged 53.
Death caused by immoderate grief
for his only son,
who was suffocated
when his bedchamber caught fire
on Christmas Eve.”

I read it again.
I know this grief.
Immoderate.

Hold the paper to the light
and it stirs,
fluttering like unpinned memory.