My mother’s grief attends nightly to her bones. It is a funeral in reverse, or a funeral in slow-motion, longing for a mourning long delayed. We stall ourselves in grief—idling, passive—and the freest parts become small dark birds tearing away from us, ghost-birds in a winged cortege. We arc and circle ourselves in grief … render childlike outlines in faded chalk.

   I have mimicked many voices to track and capture my mother’s theriomorphic grief, therefore my own: history pared and blood-let outside of time. Inside time, once upon a time, my mother was, as she tells it, a terrified-out-of-her-mind seventeen-year-old, not knowing what was going on, loud brassy voices and foot traffic, screaming her head off, nurses trying to calm her down, bound to a gurney, soprano squeaking of rubber wheels, drugs administered … and there, in the Grand Guignol of the delivery room, it came from her, into this world, a defiant trauma and membered shock, an exile and introduction swaddled in its own immediate reality … the baby banged furiously on air, tiny flailing fists producing music from large pools of nothing. I drank these large pools of nothing into my lungs, and I was initiated: I was passed around, I was wiped, I glided through air, I felt the burning of light, I was a pair of eyes just turned on. Everything, not so much new, as it was returning to me again, with a different cast, different narrative, different set of circumstances, and I, memoryless, cased in a spastic wingless body consumed with hunger.