Maryam believes archive is not a story, but an accumulation; she writes, the heart was never meant to be a single polished place. 

How seamlessly she sees the bridges any history could cross. 

We talk about where you choose to live and how that changes your definition of hospitality.  

I have been the hand to clasp in a crowd; I have been the person to tug toward escape. 

People like to share the fact of a cow’s four stomachs  

but little remark on its heart, which is the size of a human head. 

Each organ an accumulation of life’s gross materials, each a process, some repeated more than others. 

She keeps a camera roll as attendance to Virginia’s fields, cattle herds, flower pots, the moon.  

The folk wisdom goes that if cows lay down, it’s going to rain. (There will always be some disagreement.) We count  

the bent knees of every herd. O hospitable pasture.  

Pull out your photos like a retrospective tarot deck. Is the answer in memory? 

No recitation of facts is anything but the polish on a story, because you cannot archive a feeling. 

April: I weave my life into the lives of others, fold each day into theirs. Time passes through four stomachs. 

Each day: I disappear like an unremarkable heart.