what’s put before you, or step aside. We’re in

lean times. It’s like with my neighbor, every morning

scavenging the news—she recently started dating

a guy from a region now under invasion, and she

plans their conversations. I see her getting gooey

at the mention of a fresh blockade or gassing, excited

for the two of them to drink and decry it that evening.

Days when the war is dormant, she’s almost grieving.

A therapist once assured me he had enough money

to purchase outright a late-model luxury

car, but he drove something unremarkable instead.

His whole thing was he didn’t want his patients,

walking past his parking space, to nurture

resentments, to conceptualize their pain as a kind

of fuel for his modish life. That never made

sense—wouldn’t he want the costliest car on offer,

so his patients could see it plainly and be assured

they understood where their dollars were going?

They know he has money. Now they’ll go wild

imagining him spending on things unseen, parking

his dump of a car outside of the men’s boutique,

striding in and petting a stack of silk briefs.

THEY SPENT MORE ON THE OUTSIDE THAN ON

THE INSIDE, I overheard someone say in the ticket line

to enter a redone museum, to which her friend

responded LOOK WHO’S TALKING. They were both

wearing black and their clothing matched

the matte of the curved facade. It was like that joke

you’re supposed to make when someone shows up

wearing military camouflage print for personal style:

I ALMOST DIDN’T SEE YOU! I prefer a different

bit, in which I imagine that everyone sporting

woodland-pattern anoraks and desert-pattern pumps

is enlisted in a single stateless army, and I feel my

own fear of them and my propulsion to hand over

whatever they want, but what do they want?

FIFTY YEARS OF PROTEST ART. Somewhere between

the cast-polymer dynamite at the palace door

and the offset lithograph WE WON’T FIGHT

ANOTHER RICH MAN’S WAR, a museum might also

want to present a show of its own obstructions—

you’re nothing in this town if you can’t

monetize your sins. Combing through the archives,

they’ll hit on a trove of letters from eminent

artists, sent in protest when the museum started,

lamenting the ticket price of fifty cents. That

was big money then. SHOULD ACCESS TO ART BE

RESTRICTED TO PEOPLE OF MEANS? Frame it,

tack it to the wall. The cost of a ticket today is twenty

dollars, an increase of thirty-nine hundred percent.

Some museums get famous for having been robbed—

institutions with this distinction can include with their

twenty-dollar ticket an exhibit of the empty frames.

SHOULD ABSENCE OF ART BE RESTRICTED

TO PEOPLE OF MEANS? When the policy states that

carryalls must be left at the lobby desk, I always

wonder if their worry isn’t weapons, but empty