What Your Dad’s Underpants Have To Do With Space Travel (Brady Rhoades)

(Editor’s Note: Brady Rhoades is a Southern California writer whose work has appeared in Visions International, Chiron Review, Comstock Review, Beacon Street Review, Bryant Literary Review, Antioch Review and many other publications. We are thrilled to have him as our first guest blogger.)

What Your Dad’s Underpants
Have To Do With Space Travel

Been thinking of the astronaut who drifted away

in his capsule, still drifting in the huge space out there,

part of a loop. Eighty five years old,

going bony, brain splat on the steel hatch,

mouth in a slush, thighs running around the cabin.

Written off by the Russian government in 1960.

Nobody wants to think of him this way. It’s better

not to think of some things, like your Dad’s underpants.

Where is the good in my Dad’s underpants? you ask.

And what’s it got to do with astronauts?

Which reminds me: he must have been wearing underpants.

It’s not all about spacesuits, radar, physics.

Nobody wants to admit that sad diaper was loosed

on the universe, but it was, an artifact

of the human race, and they’ll draw conclusions, you know.

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