still under construction, the kiss as thunderclouds in summer sky that sometimes means lightning, as the smell of after rain. As the dress hanging from anything other than a person: the shadow it casts, a kind of furrow. As the shape of two people reaching for something far away, reaching for something like oranges. As miles from home. As the only thing you ever knew about the wild is that one needed water and a flashlight because reportedly, people get lost in the wild all the time. As in a hotel room one evening listening to the stranger singing to Donovan yonder stands your orphan with his gun, the face Joan Baez made. As the birds that knew Pompeii was blowing, long before people did and tried to warn people, at a time in history when no one spoke bird. As the terrible jars of light in our stomachs, there perhaps because of us. As once on your way home from the party the street back to your house was lined with basketball hoops because a family on the corner had bought one and before long every house had one and not many of the kids actually used them and that night the basketball hoops looked especially strange and lonely guarding the houses, begging to be touched. And you did. As you kissing each and every one on your way home from the party.
Keegan Lester
Ars Poetica
Keegan Lester is the poetry editor and co-founder of the journal Souvenir. His poetry is published in: The Atlas Review, Cutbank, The Barn Owl Review, Ilk Journal, Indigest, Blunderbuss, and Phantom Limb, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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