
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.
1 reply on “Sagan”
I love this. What wonderful sentences, one after another.