Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey

The Museum of Loss and Renewal

I fucked off to another country
because things got too dire at home.
The fascists were coming for democracy.
Collapse was not a matter of if, but when—
I had read a lot of articles about this.
I knew far less about the other country’s
fascists, so that was better.
I took a plane and a train and a taxi cab,
gazed at unfathomed rushing parts of earth
through gnat-smeared windows.
The whole world is a museum
if you always keep glass between you
and the thing you’re looking at,
I remember telling the taxi driver.
He didn’t understand, so I tried in Spanish,
and then he understood less. El museo,
he said, when he dropped me off
at the hotel. You will like it. So I went
and I did. There was a lot of revolutionary
art. I had always wanted to make art
for the revolution, but there didn’t seem
to be a market for it these days.
I left the museum, read Vonnegut
on a park bench in the sun. How
pleasant, the warmth on my skin.
A well-intentioned man could
stiffen into statue, here beneath
the jacaranda trees. A well-intentioned man
could live like this forever.

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Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Portland, Oregon. In their writing, they hope to explore human-nature relation and deconstruct binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. Their work appears in publications such as Adroit Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly and Cincinnati Review. They can be found on X/Bluesky/Instagram @esmepromise