Poetry
Sour Grapes
by Holly Day
The spaceship falls apart in a shower of fireworks, and we all point and say
damn, there goes another billionaire, go back to our menial jobs, wonder what it’s like
to see the world from up there, right before the faulty o-ring slips
the heat-shielding panels crumple on reentry
the small cache of surreptitiously-planted dynamite goes off inside the hull.
They’ve taken all the fun out of going into space, of the idea
of planetary colonization, or reaching for the stars. Moonwalks and spacewalks
are paid for in tickets stamped with real gold, given as gifts to children and girlfriends
who secretly wanted ponies and jewelry, meanwhile
gaseous clouds of fire belch out over concrete platforms, expelling CO2
in levels equal to those produced by an entire city over the course of a year
and we still unwrap labels from beer cans so they can be properly recycled,
turn off the lights when we exit a room, make sure we don’t waste a single drop of water.
There’s a joke in here somewhere
but you can’t hear them laughing way up in space.