KEEGAN LESTER
What I imagine of the place you grew up in, that you still don’t call home, from time to time when your voice’s register catches me off guard and I see you more than I hear your man costume
I guess
it’s too late
to live on the farm
to tattoo our eyelids
melt the golden
bars of chain and band
because the floodlight
spoke to me
at the bottom of bayou
last night, where muck
and mud ghost
and cleft lip black snaked
and widowed. i could see the trail
they left before us,
their knees and breasts,
their arms and fingers
dug into that shale sand
and you couldn’t tell
just by looking at it
like you can’t tell from
a reproduction of a painting,
but the strokes
were all there. i guess
it’s too late to live
on the farm
thrush crushing thrush
with their beaks
under the dark blanket of sky
where you said that noise,
those are angels out there
killing for angels because
angels don’t kill for god
under a blanket of anything
and because i was taught as a boy
that angels do their killing
out in the open
i wear this shirt
for good luck, the doe
sewn into the inside of the cuff
means don’t startle so easy,
don’t be a tuft of hair
but the entire scalp.
be something the others
will have to axe down,
will have to break you from
you, you yourself, from this earth
with silver bullet
with a horse that’s not theirs
and thus named in haste
as a name and gravity
are the only way
to get to somewhere else.
Keegan Lester is the author of this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions, 2016). He is the cofounder and poetry editor of Souvenir Lit and lives in New York City.