Category: articles
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3.5: Tikhov in Awkward Rhyme
Shallow oceans for the sailing Temperatures benign at best Through the telescope tube’s lens? Venus! She invited tropical whaling Old Tikhov sketched what the probes would find with a quick & chary math He predicted a nursemaid covered in plants Waggish blue stolons on clear flushing lobes Later, people laughed at those precepts…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3: Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov
The Belarusian used chromatic aberration to decidedly advantage an unfeathering of spectrographs for the surface sobbed ruffles of the mirth with which he would flirt He ascended in a gelatin balloon to watch meteors with his friends from the Sorbonne Sternly clutched by the puffs he was, as the blue-gas-flame sibilated girlishly for buoyancy…
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Freud Considering the Eel
And this is the truth of it: we still don’t know precisely where freshwater eels come from. For 2,500 years scholars had zero luck because eels apparently lacked reproductive organs. Aristotle tried to figure it out. Italian scientists in the 1700s made it a point of national honor. In the late 19th century a graduate…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 2: Yuriy Vasilievich Kondratyuk
A dishy dark-pupiled Ukrainian Олександр Гнатович Шаргей His mother married his pater in January and Yuri infiltrated the world that June She taught French in Kiev; a social activist, thus, she was declared insane His great-grandfather had battled Napoleon His father loved physics. Yuri read his books. While fighting on WWI’s Caucasian Front,…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 1: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Scarlet fever infected the man as a boy in Izhevskoye taking most of his hearing / He turned to books & spherical trigonometry Before too long, he had carefully worked out Tsiolkovsky’s Formula – an elegant dynamite whooosh! of math for prosecuting stelae up – Next, he penned more to calculate the…
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Pfeilstorchs
Migration was difficult to know. It’s not surprising. Who could say why birds leave for a time, where they go? Aristotle thought that birds just transmuted into a different species when the weather changed. Later, it was assumed that birds hibernated. Charles Morton believed they flew to the moon. Even in the 19th century naturalists…
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Blueblack of the Liar’s Sea
watercolor tapestries of ocean ghosts to breach a dream blurred the foggy mythos of blueback of the Liar’s Sea ancestors of whale-men fought the yellow tentacle devils afire in dark orange boulders a scenic vista of hell sulfuric grey vermilion cavern suddenly seems pale empty of midnight stardrifts, pink nebulas fair but one being,…
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Reclaiming the Earth
A Preliminary Report on Research, Documentation, and Deconstruction of Tectonic Patriarchy and Gender Bias SK Shultz, H Brown, KJ Kelly, and OP Whiddon Abstract The well-established study of plate tectonics provides geologists with the explanations for many geological occurrences which previously had suffered from misunderstanding, misinterpretation or misrepresentation, including the existence of hydrothermal vents and…
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Atlantic
The dark rock was rugged and would scrape bare feet if they ever dared to dance on its surface. In the creases and caverns of the rock, the seawater pooled, and over time grew algae and kelp. It sprouted glutinous leaves and slick bushels. There were places where barnacles exploded from the land, their fungal…
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This Lethal Practice
And here, a poet in a forgotten state. Caucasian Albania, we call it, though it was in what is now Azerbaijan. We don’t even know what they called it. And yet, there the poet. He’s brute forcing a piece as we watch. The trappings are familiar. A cat on a windowsill by candlelight. A half-eaten…
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Invisible Microphone
I lift her shirt carefully in the same way I did the night before, exposing this roundness new to us both. Leaning close, I speak loud in a playful accent not quite my own into some invisible microphone. “Hello baby, this is your father.” She giggles and the bump stays calm. “Dork,” she says. Neither…
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THE INFINITE ROPE TO FOREVER
The winding straightaway flees like a comet’s tail a wedge across basin to a distant range. Down here is my marble head of many basins seeing itself from the side blinking and breathing like the wind outside, rock that’s not yet stone, just stardust, perhaps water as a mist giving slight hope against evil of…