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At 38, my younger sister has started collecting
olive shells, however many she can find, their lettered 
and netted shapes litter her shelves, they spill out of plastic boxes, 
ziploc bags and mason jars.
 
How hard a thing it is, to hold onto a place, to say
I live here and I am of here. How does a person come to belong?
 
I’ve rested the skull of a house sparrow in my attic office. Is home 
the place you bury your dead? (House sparrows are from Europe. 
There, they are disappearing. Here they flourish, they outcompete.) 
 
I have olive shells, too, their incoherent script like 
electrocardiograms, but nothing lives inside anymore, 
only the memory of the body
it once carried. And the memory of the bodies they carried 
beneath the sand where they held their prey close, 
until it was absorbed. I run my thumb over 
the smooth outer lip, over the sharp edges 
of the crowning spiral. 
 
I ask my husband 
if he knows what to do with me when I die?
Somewhere in this house, I have a garfish scale, 
somewhere I have a butterfly 
pinned up in a frame.