Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash
Having gone from hot
to invisible, Pilot Watts
exits the ship. She knows all
the astronautical
disasters, from Bradbury’s “Kaleidoscope”
to the Challenger’s throttling up
in Technicolor, the explosion that brought
NASA to its knees, but she thought
she was one of them now, she had hopes.
What she imagined, though,
doesn’t matter: the real
heroes have rocketed down the slide,
into the arms of Molly Mound
and the ex-wife who has found
divorce too keen a separation, unjust
a child kept from his father, and repents.
From her place at the rear
she checks her hair.
It is a reflex familiar to her
as breathing, as dear as her name, Jennifer,
or the transcripts she memorized
by flashlight, under the covers, as a girl enthralled with flight.
There’s ten-thousand
feet and Mach point five,
Pilot Smith says, an anyone like Hollis
in Bradbury’s story, the two of them
by turns jubilant, doomed
and falling, and her with them,
an astronaut
all on her own, forgotten,
on this brave day at Kennedy
when she helped to save the world.
Robin Kozak's writing has appeared or is upcoming in Arkansas Review, Field, The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Rappahannock Review, and Sequestrum, and her awards include two Creative Artist Program grants from the city of Houston and the 2016 Sandy Crimmins Prize for Poetry. An authority on antique and estate jewelry, she currently is finishing Berkowitz, a collection of short fiction.