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by Keegan Lester That Jesus was hanging crooked against the wall of my social studies class on his cross, & that it was April & morning & that my teacher who then still alive, still speaking with an accent which may have been from Arkansas or Vermont & held the magic of perhaps being from anywhere but here, & the part I most remember is the nicotine yellow of her teeth rotting before our eyes. I remember that year we wrote reports on a state & I chose Washington because the one thing I knew then about Washington was Washington had wild orcas swimming up & down its coast. Do you like apples or something children teased. No, I like orcas, I would say. I remember a woman from the office whispering into the ear of my teacher. I remember my teacher not yet crying, walking over to the television the way paramedics are trained to walk which is in slow motion. Steady movements as if we were the small precious animal that might dart into the dank soft of wood with any misstep on her part. I remember the television warmed a second before flicking on, that it had a dial, & the class so quiet I could feel the catch of each turn landing into its notch & continuing on as if it was my spinal cord, my vertebrae with each notch moving onward. I remember a grainy version of them. That they were older kids, baggy sweaters & ill-fitting jeans, running out of a school, hands glued to the back of their heads, ducking beneath an invisible boom, heads lowered as if in prayer. I remember the policeman who spoke in front of a podium had a mustache like my father’s & the woman newscaster’s hair tangled like a bushel of wheat. I remember men on rooftops in army gear, guns drawn pointed at a school in Colorado. At that age, the only thing I knew of Colorado was the Rocky Mountains were there & of the snow in those mountains killing the Donner party, & the Donner party killing the Donner party, & the first time I ever heard the word cannibalism. I remember we were taught they so badly wanted to live in California to start new, back when California still touched Texas like a brother’s shoulder. Now, I don’t think the Donner party even died in Colorado. The Donner party might not have even stepped foot in Colorado, is how much I knew about Colorado in April of 1999 before a lazy graphic spun onto the screen, which came to be known as a swipe from center to lower right, reading 13 people dead, which is then & now the lucky number of my family. I remember Bill Clinton’s face red & puffy, & he speaking slow with his pointer finger that day, back in the days where he was tough on crime & lax on domestic terrorism. Think bloated prisons, think Waco, think Super Predator, Unabomber, Oklahoma City & Wal-Mart. Think all the things we learned & did not learn on a television screen during social studies class in the sixth grade. I remember a police officer said There were two loner teenage gunman, which means each gunman had one more friend than I that day. I grew up in the country of they are trying to take our guns away from us. I grew up in the country of they took our children away with their guns. I grew up in the country of they took our children away. I grew up in the country of they took our children with their guns. I grew up in the country of they took our children away with their guns. I grew up in the country of they took our children away. I grew up in the country of they took our children away with their guns. I grew up in the country of they took & took & took & took our children away with our guns & they broadcasted it on television, so I could learn something of America in my social studies class.  Keegan Lester is the author of this shouldn't be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it, selected by Mary Ruefle for the 2016 Slope Editions Books Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem A Day Series, The Boston Review, Diode, The Journal, and The Adroit Journal among others. He is the poetry editor and co-founder of the journal Souvenir Lit and tweets at @keeganmlester.
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