This article examines how scientists, classroom teachers, poetry educators, and youth negotiated the domains of science through their engagement in a two-year Massive Open Online Collaboration (MOOC) funded by the National Science Foundation. To make sense of learners' unconventional and interdisciplinary writing and the cultural and disciplinary conflicts that emerged around it, I offer a reframing of science literacy as a series of crash encounters. Such a reframing prompts literacy practitioners to anticipate fallout when diverse bodies, objects, and rhetorics collide and, therefore, to better design and participate in interdisciplinary networks to create more dynamic and vibrant approaches to science literacy.