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DRUNK MONKEYS IS A Literary Magazine and Film Blog founded in 2011 featuring short stories, flash fiction, poetry, film articles, movie reviews, and more

Editor-in-chief KOLLEEN CARNEY-HOEPFNEr

managing editor

chris pruitt

founding editor matthew guerrero

POETRY / After Bruckheimer: Armageddon / Robin Kozak

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash

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.

FICTION / Truth and Justice / Dane Gill

POETRY / Birbs / Carrie Conners

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