Homemade Rockets

On the baseball diamond
behind Granite Valley Elementary School
my father is bent down on both knees
fixing the red rubber wire
to the potassium nitrate engine.

Such force packed into a grey roll
of cardboard. My father starts
the countdown as he runs back
to first base pillow where I lie
laughing, my finger poised above

the red detonation button.
We reach Zero.
The rocket screams away from the earth
and I stand up, as the yellow decals
I’d carefully placed on the nose and fins

disappear into the freedom of inertia.
My father hoots and howls, dancing around
on one foot. There is a moment
I barely catch when the ship is absolutely
still (the back of the box called it
apogee).

Then it somersaults backwards,
gravity pulls open the parachute.
But I could have sworn
that this time we almost broke free,
almost kept on going

right out of the ballpark, out of
this town, and into the weightless
grandeur of outer space.