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Papier-Mâché Jupiter
- Southern Illinois University Press
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Papier-Mâché Jupiter Torn strips of the Kansas City Star,gray news from ,farm crisis headlines dredged in glue, Jimmy Carter’s crumpled face pasted on a yellow balloon. Layer on layer, she bandaged it with the worry of a maker. In the opened book was all she knew of Jupiter—a gaseous ball, distorted and large, home to a scarlet, ongoing storm.From across the night, songs came over the radio into her family’s patient house, songs to dance to, if you cared to,but she hummed instead. Her face,a curious moon, concentrated above striations of drying tempera paint,glossy bronzes and pearled blues. This is how a world gets born in a kitchen’s beneficent light, a churning wonder come from an accident of dust, some child’s science project, a flimsy planet unsuitable for orbit, puckered navel poking out. Through the window she could see the wide plain, like an earnest and well-made table holding up the heavens while she held this new Jupiter. To lift up a celestial thing,such a satisfying shape, and to turn it in the blunt span of her hands was proof enough of her own modest divinity. ...