Thursday, July 29, 2021

THE MAN AND THE IRONIC LUNG

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).