Museum at the End of the World

by M. Frost

The door was nothing special, the wood plastered with ash,

metal handle half-melted. You wouldn’t know it led to a museum.

Inside, you find everything you left behind on the journey,

objects captured under glass, moments rendered on canvas,

projectors shedding scenes onto white walls, the images poignant—

the dappled green of the tree that was the blaze of your first kiss,

the empty crater on the mountain where you lost your lover to eruption.

You can hear the soft hum of the machines, the subtle click

as a new scene is loaded. You touch the glass, the canvas, the walls,

expecting them all to glaze, to smolder, to darken with the burn.

The passage to this place—throwing down boulders of joy,

bubbling cauldrons of grief, venting yourself onto a torrent

of satellites that rain flames on re-entry—was the greatest torture

of your life. But still, you wonder why you were the one to reach the end,

the once-quiet volcano of your youth consuming you in a fresh inferno.

Skies outside rage black and red, but the place inside is quiet,

lit only by the uncertain light of the thousand steps you might never

have taken, except that you were born, breathed magma, and roared,

your voice echoing through valleys as pyroclastic flow—

that scream captured in resin, the ridges of your song a kind of braille,

the warning they should have heeded years ago, before you even set forth

on your path—twisted, fuming, humpbacked, spitting fire.

The creative work of M. Frost appears in Strange Horizons, Sublimation, Star*Line, Ad Astra, Abyss & Apex, and many others, with chapbooks Cow Poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and The Women of Myth (Island of Wak-Wak, Fall 2025). Explore further at mfrostwords.com and follow @mfrostwords.bsky.social.