A-kū and I take the train to the science museum,
The route so familiar that I can rattle off the stops.
My legs dangle from the seat on the Green Line train
And he tells me to stop kicking my feet
And stop smiling back at strangers.
The lady next to us is wearing a pretty green dress—
I decide she is on her way to work.
I look down and smile at my sneakers.
.
The museum is huge.
Dinosaurs loom and globes spin slowly,
I drag A-kū to say hello to the baby chicks and honeybees upstairs.
I’m scared of the human body exhibit in the middle of the hall
But not of the taxidermy dioramas
Nor of the Colby room full of hunting trophies.
I’m scared of blood
And the dried-up animals are bloodless
And I haven’t realized yet that science has a violent way of capturing.
.
At lunch we eat dumplings packed from home,
My favorite frozen brand that A-kīm buys.
A-kū’s Diet Coke has been shaken up in his green backpack
And I startle as it sprays all over the table.
He laughs and mops it up with napkins.
Lessons in carbonation and entropy:
The fizz in the puddles fizzling out;
Spilled soda escaping the can.
.
I am six years old and I don’t know yet
That a decade later, I see A-kū cry
And A-kīm is not saved by science.
I try to decide that she is only sleeping,
But after the failed CPR there’s a speck of blood on the hospital sheet.
.
A-kū’s favorite exhibit is “Mathematica.”
We dance in front of the funhouse mirror
And watch a toy train loop around on the one side of a giant Möbius strip,
Inevitably making it back around to where it started.
These days I think of the probability pinball machine
And what things once were and could have been,
The things that will never make it back around.
