The stranger writes happily ever after
after cancer gnaws
the body
of my friends that dared drink water from their tap.
Tell me how my friends are capable of living
in the same elegy as strangers,
how their water is biblical,
a plague of cicada,
small, dormant, undetected, sleeping in the body
waiting for their time
to sing
& rupture.
Tell me how you remember
the word fatalistic
sounding in the mouth of a dying child,
that it sounded different than the hired expert on the news,
than the ping of tin roof
you made
while shooting your rifle across the Ohio River once
to our side
to see what you could hit,
to see if a stranger’s roof would still shine
beneath the sun after.
It sounded different to me while visiting my grandmother in the hospital
staring into the cloud of her lake eyes
the first time
I thought of her body
as finite, blue. I used my body to burn
until there wasn’t enough body left
to confront We the myth
people need us to be. We the children
other children go to
when lost. We the children that must suffer
to make the suffering of other children
more bearable.
It’s not that the sugar maples are silent,
it’s just easier to take from them
when one doesn’t listen.
Keegan Lester's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Poem a Day, Cutbank, Diode, The Adroit Journal and Sixth Finch, among others, and will be anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3. His first collection, this shouldn't be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it, was selected by Mary Ruefle for the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize.