“Why call it a lab?” We both know it’s not because of latex gloves, CRISPR, or people hunched over antiseptic machines. There’s a way of asking that signals the mutuality of knowing: like an inside joke or being in on the same bad reality plotline. It’s upspeak or a tone taken. But also how a question cracks itself open as a self-diagnosis. Lab-tested. Lab-grown. A photo lab. Where realities are cleaved into tumors and pills or developed into snapshots that get passed around as a prognosis of everything. But a kitchen is a lab. Or a bed. Or a sidestreet walked over and again across harsh or subtle  seasons and tempos of disrepair. Contaminated spaces might not shell out repeatable truths—but practice happens here. The bubbling-up of yeasty dough, the soft or hard coordination of lover’s bodies, the same old house in freak weather or the glow of dusk light. Each time a new technology.

Everything is a lab.