Keegan Lester
The Topography of Airports
a second time.
doesn’t feel so bad when saying it.
a direction towards:
we are nowhere.
we raveled into Iowa,
re-ravel into Johannesburg or almost
anything, as handfuls of finger paint.
before home was a girl scout’s malaria
shaped merit badge,
everything posing as music.
before I’d ever seen stars, I wished
upon palm trees
bent by the wind,
that one day they too could fall
and be strange.
easy to confuse for a foreign city:
here, heart also means feet
when waiting & waiting on until then
to happen, & I’ve forgotten where…
someone else’s native tongue
from my mouth, soft
as I could speak &
as long as I could outrun furrows
when the water was bad
in West Virginia & because the water
is still bad in West Virginia
& it’s my home: we, our only garden
to be conscious in
& still: the sky a field,
as is the lean-to and a thin horizon
of wheat. It was easy
to turn into the tiny
gondolas overhead
that my grandfather
watched as a child.
