Passing

The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, 
Harvard Museum of Natural History The ovaries, when splayed, resemble sliced tomatoes. Or rose windows, each geometry precise enough to praise. I want to press my tongue against the bloodroot petal, to run its stamen along my slick shelf of teeth like a man might with a wheat stalk. Four times so far other tourists have taken me for a gallery attendant. In the glass, a slow- sidling crimson spreads over my own skewed reflection: a hesitant teen in a Harvard hoodie, the fifth, leans in to ask,Excuse me, sir? Are they really glass?— a testament to how my binder encases my breasts, my faith in the plum yew’s fruit- shorn frenzy. Dense clusters teeming with their separate blossoms, any unknowing eye might think they were living. But I know the lilac’s tell: two blemishes, bulbous where some hot glass mis-dripped, then caught forever in the filament. Sometimes, I think I’ll wake to find they’ve finally trickled off me in the night, pooled molten down the bed and gathered back again. I might thrash off both breasts in a sleepless fit, or could unfurl my clit like a pollen basket passed from a honeybee’s hind legs to the hive. It makes its secret seen. I can only answer yes. Yes, They’re real. I mean, they’re really glass. You could snap a stem between fingers with such a slight force, one stark blink — the flies flitting the gallery would fear the weight of their own landing, thick wings rapt still. When the public, in their distressed astonishment, demanded to know how the Blaschkas transported the models without a fracture in even one pistil, Leopold Blaschka revealed his own elaborate process: pack each flower tightly in its cardboard cradle, then strap them down with strong wire to restrict movement, and set each, at last, in a wooden box wrapped with burlap. They drove them straight from Manhattan in two hearses. The drivers, of course, wore black suits. Onlookers parted to allow their small procession past. I like it here, with everyone focused on the flowers. Hunched, kneeling, as if suspicious, still doubting, the teen eyes two tiny zinnias, then moves on to another case. I’ve seen many leave unsatisfied. They can’t bear to be partitioned — how can I blame them? Someone made these with their body. They let their breath unspool to form each impossible bud, crafted every flower’s fold, then waited on the heat to break to hold just one, wearing special gloves. Wouldn’t anyone wish for just one lie among a garden this precise? One daisy swapped out in secret, switched with a common courtyard flower, now waiting for someone to notice its wilt while its counterparts keep all their glisten. It does seem to me true punishment: never to change. Unflinching forever. Sometimes, near closing, when the hall becomes quiet, I really do believe they’re real.