Keegan Lester
The Topography of a Roundabout
when there are no cameras
to translate the quiet.
when I think in the backyard:
you’ll never be manhattan
and like rushmore, the faces
in the trees look smaller in real life
who’s bark winter pealed back
look like the faces of the imaginary
forepeople that helped me
found this place. and like rushmore,
we make postcards
to help preserve their memory
during the summer months
and I apologize to everything I’ve ever loved
for overlooking the sovereignty
of your life without me.
for not seeing you were too big
for the stadium pools they kept you in
after the show. we are all created
equal parts stardust
and I gathered with the rest of them each fall
to watch the strongest collide
into each other in front of stadiums
and someone called this the italian renaissance,
medieval, the end of civilization. beauty
finds such crush inside beauty:
what was above us, had always been
above us and what was around us
now apparent only in its indifference
to what we once thought. this town:
a blistered and broken mouth—
I admit I was high when I first noticed
the tectonics of things, their movements—
the oxiheads on the staircase
now younger than me. and these
our mouths. and these our stars to share.
