Emily Gordon

God forbid I should try to improve myself, says the bitter jobber whose family truck is stolen outside the workshop where we are bonding steel with argon gas. I’m learning to weld and getting burned constantly. I am fidgety during the chemistry lesson. Each half hour I consult ...

Small rockets crash every day, at science fairs, in parking lots, at White Sands Missile Range where a grad student launches her own nervous breakdown. Scientists cry all the time. They cry in the clean room and the tears wet their masks, and they can’t blow their ...

The awake, all straight-backed and well-groomed, wait at a table made of sharp sunlight. I’m late as usual, but this is the morning I give in, sign over everything: pillow-gluttony, sheet-sickness, the blanket’s wrapper like skin on my skin, clock meaningless. This solo has ...