by Ron Riekki
It’s your coffin now —Sharon Olds, from “Satan Says”
My brother says there is nothing funnier than Steven Crowder
having a collapsed lung, and I tell him I would never use
the word “funnier” with Steven Crowder, that only “misery”
works with that guy, how he supposedly re-created George
Floyd’s murder by having a guy dressed as a cop lightly
kneel on his neck and how my brother said he’d like to kneel
on Crowder’s neck for real, & then a few months later & he has
a collapsed lung, how fitting, how perfectly fitting, this feeling
that God is listening, how a thirty-four-year-old doesn’t have
a collapsed lung from nothing, how divine that intervention is,
the irony of all the hate that came out of Rush Limbaugh’s lungs,
how it makes sense that he’d go that way, how words can be
cancerous, how hate speech affects the lungs, the throat, the heart.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).