Phenomena
Kory
Wells
The
men at my first real job
spit tobacco juice into Coke cans,
or smoked, or at least drank
caffeine. In the mornings
they backed into parking spaces
at the ready for day's end.
They wore pocket protectors,
security badges, white lab coats,
spoke of deltas and sigmas,
of seven-point bucks and Silver Queen corn,
of the time Gene Carothers took
twelve hundred volts
and lived. They kept Excedrin
in their desk drawers, brought me
cucumbers and Big Boys
and Snickers, told me I was
a keeper. Recounting legends
of chickens hurled at airplane wings
in the name of flight simulation
they calculated thrust,
calibrated transducers,
carried their numbers
to the fourth decimal place,
kept coming through the gates
before seven every morning
despite scientific knowledge
that for all its beauty
a rainbow doesn't really exist.
First
published in Kudzu,
2007
***
Kory
Wells'
novel-in-progress White Line to Graceville was a finalist
in the William Faulkner Competition. A software developer, she
writes about her desire to be an astronaut and living beyond traditional
cultural roles in the anthology She's Such a Geek (Seal
Press, 2006).
©
Kory Wells