Sagan

Punky Brewster, named for the sun,
collects her grief like so much shuttle
debris. She drops her backpack
on the floor & weeps. At the school
I stand orderly in the bus line, unmoved
by the ruckus around me, looking up at the sky,
waiting for sheet metal in gasoline immolation
to throw itself into the street. At me.
 
**
 
I clean the cages of the rats. The science
teacher with hair as perfect as a space helmet
likes me, trusts me with the animals. I don't
love the rodents as much as the usefulness
of my hands. When NASA holds an event at Sunset
Park, she puts me in a yellow T with a space
insignia, sends me to touch the shuttle. I am allowed
to ask one question. I only remember the heat.
 
**
 
O Steve Jobs, did you intone Lamentations over Bradbury?
I catalog my life by his Chronicles. So when the old
man gives a talk in Burbank from his wheelchair, I go.
He speaks about poetry, about craft. He's many years
gone now, like the flip phone I borrowed from Roddenberry.
In this house, Roomba (she/her/hers) scurries
through the hallways & I tuck small shells into my ears.
Yes, it's raining outside. Yes, Siri reads a poem.
 
**
 
The sloshed physics teacher & the precalc mime
agree: I'm sloppy with my decimals. I'd fire a missile
at the moon & hit a tree. Neither suggests
what could open for me, to train for flight, to become
an engineer. I want to know the heat of derivatives & integrals
that measure curved space & speed, that a woman's
hands calculated the path to the moon. But I am disbelief.
I escape in meter instead, burn the science out of me.
 
**
 
She says, at three, that Earth is a planet, that you pee
in your spacesuit & it gets vacuumed out. No gravity
causes a body to float. She tells me she will become
an astronaut, live in the stars. I cannot answer her
when she asks if I too will go. So I say only, yes,
she will learn to chase comets, to defy men & the moon.
I will teach her geometry & history, as dictated
by my degrees, & watch from the ground—her rising feet.