Mailboxes Poem by Christopher Keller

Out there, were freeways of Montana wheat fields,
and I didn't need to say anything to anyone,
rolling down the sleeves of an Oldsmobile,
leaning out of that husk with a drunken kiss on my lips,
and I could smell the blackened stalks between the stars.

And what I thought of,
was being eighty and watching a childhood friend refuse
the thin cylinders of fluid that would pause his body
while accepting May and the icicles that had begun to drip,
till there was no reason to stand beside his hospital bed.

It's what I thought of when I was sixteen and alone.

Outside, I would torque my marathoner shoulders and torso,
while Dan drove over an audience of adolescent rocks,
with Kara struggling to look through the black stalks,
and in back, tightening his fists, Tim would hunt for a fight,
in air that would brittle the hands of any rancher.


I didn't care about mailboxes or the hands
that turned the screw driver securing them to their posts,
or if the vomited snow along the culvert
accepted diesel and lemon colored condoms
as much as a mailbox accepts a Louisville to the head.