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Reentry
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Reentry They come in the night with their powerful misters. Same ones as misted Mary so now she’s all poisoned water supplies and the good thing about national tragedy is she can weep in the Frito aisle like always and not be quarantined. Same ones as hurt my hermeneutics. I wouldn’t call them people exactly, more voices in plumbing, more what you’d get after some flesh-eating bacterium had its way with a glowworm. But they’re very clean. I’m not talking the idea of them, not some incense-smelling, arachnoid clump in your rink-a-dink imperium. I’m talking fire lurking inside the match, stink inside its cousin bee. It is as if a yellow highlighter moves through my brain, not entirely unpleasant I admit like a dream of drum majorettes. Anyway, it makes me different. I don’t see flags the same. Use lots of code. Stuff shot into space the day I was born is circling back to crush me, its data incinerated and blasted-apart on reentry so that’s not a lot of help. 80 You know what it’s like to come out of a matinee into bright day, don’t you? Now imagine moving thirty thousand miles an hour and it’s half a million degrees then tell me what you think of yourself. Me? I’m just sitting here quietly, part of an immense, mutilated spiral. 81 ...