Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/VBe9zj-JHBs) 05.02.2023.
In prison, when they threw urine in my face,
they took all my clothes. They said it was evidence.
I was naked in a bathroom waiting, flushing my eyes
for twenty minutes in case there was HIV or hepatitis,
and the bathrooms were the second most dangerous place
in the prison, the most dangerous being the chapel . . .
and when he choked me in middle school, I didn’t know
he’d end up on the homecoming court and he straddled me
and his father was best friends with my father and he spit
a long slow spit so that it clung to his lips, not breaking,
and then he sucked it back into his mouth and then he did it
again, his spit hanging in front of my mouth, and he was so
popular and I didn’t know how much that was saying
about the world . . . and in the social work class, I felt some-
times like we were learning the art of humiliation, of bullying . . .
and I remember during the war when I went to the chaplain
and said that I couldn’t stay in any longer and he asked if I was
a conscientious objector, but he said the words like they were
floating in feces and there was an embarrassment to the words
and I said that I just didn’t want to kill anything and he was silent
and the pews were so dark, as if light had never been invented . . .
and ten of us would die and I would stay in and ten of us would
die . . . and I wish sometimes, so badly, that I could write a poem
where you could see my heart, which I feel sometimes, telling
the doctor at the VA that I’m worried, that I can feel it in my chest,
that you’re not supposed to be able to feel your heart and the nurse
said softly, no, I don’t feel my heart . . . and when they gave me 30%
disability, they also included in my acceptance letter information on
those who were killed that I knew and I wondered why they did that,
why they would give me the details about the plane crash . . . and in
boot camp when I cried the drill instructor grabbed me by the throat
and choked me so that I wondered if he was going to kill me and his
eyes ate my eyes and I realized if I ever cried again that he actually
might kill me and so I died inside and it was wonderful, so freeing,
this desperation for survival where I left my body and where I left
my mind and where he got me ready for the war and got me ready
for the prison and got me ready for the loneliness that fills this room
so deeply that all I am left with is this stunning feeling of my heart
in my chest telling me that I am alive but not for long so I had better
live in the woods because that’s where the peace is and when I was
young I would honestly try to get lost in the woods, on purpose,
would head into directions I didn’t know until I had no idea where
I was and then I’d try to find my way back home and it was always
too easy, because of the airplanes in the sky that let me know where
the airport was, and when I was a child, swear to God, my parents
took me to the airport because the news said that Muhammad Ali
would be there, and he was, and it was a small town and he was
there because the national boxing training camp wanted a small
town to train in where the boxers would have nothing to do except
train and I remember Muhammad Ali, his smile, and so I walked
straight towards him, passed the tape that they had told us not
to pass, but I was so little, so security didn’t know what to do and
I walked up to Muhammad Ali and sat next to him and he was like
God and his smile was like God’s and the cameras flashed like gods
and he looked down at me and he was so intensely happy to be alive . . .
When I was an EMT, there was a guy in back having a heart attack
“never say that I was false of heart,”
--William Shakespeare,
sonnet CIX
and I remember this cop
pulling up alongside us
and he motioned to me,
because I was the driver,
and he went to the middle
of the intersection with
lights on so the traffic
would stop and we passed
through and he sped up
and he went to the next
light and did the same,
so that we could go straight
through it and the guy in
back was having a heart
attack and I’d hated cops
for all my life, had a cop
pull a gun on me and tell
me to get on the ground,
motherfucker, and I did
and I was the wrong person
and I remember how I kept
shaking, all that day, and
the next day, and the next,
and this cop sped to the next
light and we drove through it
and I knew the guy in back
was going to live. I just knew.
I just knew it. We just knew.
My grandmother, as she got older, was more and more like the child she once was and I remember when she
asked me the difference
between
clouds and smoke and ghosts
and asked me the difference
between
poems and psalms and notes / that I scribble / that are / fragments / of thoughts / she found
and she asked
if ghosts
and smoke and clouds are fragments too / and they are / and then / she was gone.
My father told me
That blizzards are full of ghosts,
that you can see dead children
at the edge of the horizon
where the snow is at its most violent
and I asked him years later why
he would tell me such a thing
and he said that he’d never said it,
so the next time a blizzard came
through Negaunee, I went outside
and stared into the heart of the cold
forcing my eyes to open in the wind,
and my ancestors told me to go back
inside and so I did and the fire was kind.
My chronic pain is something I try to write out of me but it wins and I lose and I keep trying but it’s like trying not to die
and I’m a writer and I sometimes try to trick myself into thinking
I never cried in boot camp, but I did, and the drill instructor grabbed me
by the throat and put one of his eyes as close as he could to one of my eyes
and he told me that if I ever cried in front of him again that every person
in that room had permission to do anything they wanted to me and he didn’t
tell me what that was and I remember him walking away and realizing
that he’d just taken away forever my ability to cry and I remember the rain
that day and the crickets that night and how both were so loud and how
both were so insistent that I realized they existed and it was only a couple
days later when one of us killed himself in a way that I won’t tell you
because I want this poem to be published so that you can see that there is
a fire in my blood and blood in my fire and I beg for you to see me, please.
About the Author: Ron Riekki’s books include Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates (Middle West Press, poetry), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, hybrid), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, nonfiction), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press, fiction).
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