For the Monkey Astronauts of America in the 1950s
Jenny McDougal
You each must have been delirious, caged
and pricked, inside those tin capsules, locked
into place by nimble fingers. Some of you
were barely the size of a bread loaf, chittering
and active even as they snapped pictures of
you strapped down, cuffed and pinned into
place, these unnatural bonnets. You are all
icons, most named Albert, your deaths the same:
suffocation, death upon impact, complications due to
parachute failure, overheating, lost at sea, explosion,
stress, stress, stress. Sometimes mice flew with you
to test the limits of cosmic radiation on mammals.
I can’t imagine the fear—was it red-hot like a forest
fire? All those snapping and popping branches,
orchards lit up like a supernova, your homes burning.
Twenty small deaths long before Apollo I, long
before a human tried to reach that zenith. What
kinds of lies did we tell to do this to you all? Able,
a monkey who survived lift-off and landing, is stuffed
and mounted on display at the National Air and Space
Museum, locked forever in that mechanical space suit.
We often sing the praises of things strange and failed,
and things beastly and lovely. The wildness of your
lives is a thing gutted, your hearts ignored. Baker,
Able’s flight partner, lived for twenty-five years
after returning to earth, only to find she couldn’t be
around other squirrel monkeys, couldn’t understand
the impossibility of their existence when she had seen
so much. Do you think she wanted to go back, to see
the dazzling halo come upon her like a storm? I bet
she dreamt of it, her old life a slow forgetting, her
fingers always testing the gravity for something lighter,
even after sleep took her.
JENNY MCDOUGAL lives and writes in St Paul, Minnesota where she teaches English at St. Catherine University and is Co-Editor and Founder of Versus Literary Journal. She is a semi-finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nimrod, Paper Darts, Red Bird, sleet magazine, and elsewhere. She loves roller-skating, discussing feminist narratives in literature, and most things that are neat.
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