matchbook

hey ask before the museum doors drift shut behind us. When will we go back and brush the plants that know to fold against threat. Rebuild the bonobo, its empty bones so like ours. They want to see Venice flood again in miniature, seawater reaching a little higher each year. Reilluminate the organs in the woman’s transparent torso: gallbladder and lungs and plastic heart that’s never double-timed against ribs. The phosphorescent wall will hold them in outline for a few heartbeats once they’ve gone. Escalators—climbing, to reach the top twice as fast. When will we return to the birds? Preserved in drawers. Not one will have aged. My kids, this trip, were too scared to watch the scientists make lightning—Tesla coils shocking up five hundred thousand volts. But when we come back, for sure. They’ll be older then, and braver. We get older, and doesn’t that make us braver? They want another visit to the gift shop. Astronaut ice cream for nine dollars a bag and we bought an armful, because when will we get back there. Space food too fragile to have ever gone into space. It would have powdered, sweet, into the pressurized air.