Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 17

The Roots of Pessimism in Model Rocketry, the Fallacy of Its Premise

X-Ray had a see-thru payload chamber.

The Flyer Saucer model was a gyp —

unless you were the kind of kid who loved

the balsa wood shredding more than flight time,

the smashing down more than the going up.

When Big Bertha sheared my brother’s pinkie

I watched medicine make its promise good:

in the future we would all be androids.

The doctors reinstalled his milky nail

and drained blue fingertip, though afterward

I felt a little cheated. Already

I’d envisioned how his mutant terrors

could be put to my use, the naked stub

unsheathed to jinx an enemy sneaker.

We were a tribe of Josef Mengeles

doing frontier science: putting crickets

in the payload, betting if they’d return

alive or dead. I always bet on death

because they always came down dead. I was

the pessimist, the child of many coins.

When someone fished from the dusty ballfield

the cocktail sausage of my brother’s loss,

I gave its odds less than even money.

My vote was: Put the finger in a can,

send it to Estes Model Rocket Co.

who would feel guilty enough to send cash.

But guilt turned on me. Now my brother’s hand

looks perfect, except when he makes a fist.