Celeste Oster

A Terrible Sonnet for Jerome

It was June and the trees were speaking their 
sea language above our heads and sharing 
sugar through roots deep underground.  We were 
walking through the woods, talking and eating 
Cheetos.  We were kids in grownup bodies, 
waving our orange fingers and speaking 
with orange mouths of life’s atrocities.  
Years later, Silvie would find you hanging 
in the silence of your wood shop, the dead 
heaviness of old lumber all around 
you.  Dust motes floated in air overhead.  
It was September. Your burial ground 
was drowned in an ocean of orange leaves. 
I fed your ashes to the trees.

Celeste Oster is a compulsive taker of classes, lover of odd words, and maker of handbound books.  Her poems have appeared in Thorny Locust, The Same, and a variety of long-defunct literary journals.