SPACE SHUTTLE

My brother and I were playing
in the driveway
when my mother called us inside.
“You have to watch this.” she said
“This is history.”
She sat us in front of
an old black and white TV.
The images were fuzzy.
We watched a man climb slowly down a ladder.
A flag was planted in the dust.
Thinking that Mars was next,
we all wanted to be astronauts,
wanted it more than football glory
or riding in firetrucks.
“Study hard in school” we were told.
Years later
I was feeding lumber
into a screaming table saw.
Word filtered out to us
that the space shuttle
had exploded.
At break time
one of the guys lit a Marlboro Red,
said that the cockpit
probably stayed intact,
that the astronauts were alive
for the whole fall
back to Earth.
The bell rang,
I was back at the saw
with two hours to go.
Men scribbled on clipboards
pulled tape measures.
There were forklifts
and pickup trucks.
I remembered something
about a schoolteacher on board.

I wondered if they all held hands
on the way down
or if the gravity was too much.
The freeway stood
just beyond the chain-link.
I could see traffic slowing
cars backing up
engines would cough
and tempers would flare
down here
beneath the cloudless blue expanse.

Curtis Hayes works as a grip, gaffer, and set builder in the film industry. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, often focusing on working-class and fringe-culture themes. A split poetry collection with Don Winter, Waiting to Punch the Clock (Working Stiff Press), has recently been released, and as a follow-up to Bottleneck Slide (Vainglory Press), he is currently working on a new full-length collection of poetry and short stories, to be published in Fall 2025.