Some days the rock I keep in my pocket feels like comfort. Other days it feels like a weapon.

—Cari Luna

The lesson:

memory, which once seemed impermeable, had always been a muslin, spilling the self out like water, so that one became

a new species of naïf and martyr. And us, we’re made a cabal of medieval scholars speculating how many splinters of light

make up her diminishing core, how much we might harvest before she disappears.

—from “Beasts” by Carmen Giménez Smith