by Joseph A. Miller
The Museum of Sighs
The premise: a building that could hold
its breath. And ours. A stifle tower,
hermetic, no HVAC. A gallery of gas,
of up-cycled gasps. Mausoleum of felted
air, museum erected to vacuum-pack
the perfumes only human lungs can
atomize: the tiny thermals we exhale,
the ether of relief, the sob’s exhaust,
but mostly nitrogen. The curator’s task:
sifting. Distinguishing sighs and moans,
sighs and yawns, sighs and the Dustbuster
my grandma ran in her throat whenever
she got into a huff. And spelling out,
on a bell curve decibel, the acceptable range
of a sigh. The idea behind it all was simple—
that, by hoarding our own wist, we would
evolve, no longer subject to the heart’s little
asthmas. That we would stand outside
the museum of sighs, stethoscopes
to the past’s transparent chests, and hear
nothing. Still, it was strange sealing the archive,
airlock by airlock, at its grand opening, strange
to watch the docents bar the doors
and the curator collect the visitors’ breath
in balloons that their disappointments
barely unshriveled. But we let her have them,
those last sighs, damp with loss, let her
decant them into vitrines exactly calibrated
to their dew points, lest the glass cloud
and remind us of when we pined.
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and–one other lucky time–Feral, as well as other journals and magazines. If you like, you can find her on Twitter/X: @_janezwart_.
Joseph A. Miller is an Associate Professor of Art at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo State, where he has taught drawing and painting since 1997. Miller’s work is in numerous public and private collections, and has been shown internationally in Finland, China, Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as across the United States, from Berkeley, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work is represented by Art Dialogue Gallery in Buffalo, NY and West End Gallery in Corning, NY. Artist Website: https://artdesign.buffalostate.edu/directory/joseph-miller.