I get asked to be on a podcast

and he’s never read any of my poems, ever,

doesn’t even know my name, asks me, “So,

what’s your name?” as if this is a thoughtful

question, and I wonder how much research

he’d have had to do to find out my name,

especially when we’ve already exchanged

multiple emails, and he says, “So, what are

you?  A poet?  A fiction writer?”  And I

realize he’s going to ask me my height next

and weight after that and maybe we’ll get

into sports and weather in a bit, and I realize

how much I ache to have a person who just

simply sees me, how I was just on an elevator

yesterday with two people, one on my left

and one on my right, and how they talked

through me, as if I am a ghost, and I get

ready for the podcast host to ask me if I’m

a phantom and I get myself ready to say,

“I don’t know.  I might be.  I feel like

I’m fading.”  And I remember seeing

an interview with Norm Macdonald

when it was nearing the end of his life

and no one knew it was nearing the end

of his life, except him and a few other

very select people, and it feels like that

for me, like I’m near the end, and when

I write, sometimes I think, “Is this my last

poem?”  And I remember talking to Donald

Hall, who was always so kind to me, and him

telling me that he was too tired to write poetry

anymore, that he could write non-fiction, but

that poetry just took everything out of him,

the exhaustion, how he felt tired just telling me

this, how you could hear the enthusiasm lessening

in his voice, how frightened I was to get the sense

that someone was leaving before they were leaving

and, thank God, his words have stayed . . .

 

A friend asked me what kind of a poet I am and I said,

“a horror poet” and he asked what that means and

I showed him the statistics of murders in Detroit and

I showed him that we have a murder every day and

I took him in my car and we drove one block and

I pointed and said they murdered him for his watch.

Who?  I told him who they murdered and about his

watch and we drove and we were in front of a restaurant

and I told him about the bodies and in the last three days

we’ve had shootings on Minden Ave and on Jefferson Ave

and on Moross Rd and on Joy Rd and on Biltmore Rd

and I think of joy and not-joy, of how we keep mastering

anger, how online’s a storm, how I’ve seen footprints made

from blood, how I looked down after the riot near

my home and the footprints led to a tree and I looked

up, expecting to see someone up there, but it was empty,

and my mother used to be a therapist and she told me,

“The more symptomatic someone is, the more severe

the depression or the anxiety, the more guns they own.”

She said she could tell someone’s mental health by

the amount of guns in the home, that the people

who were the most unstable would have ten, twenty,

thirty, more guns.  That it was like the guns were this

screaming of how they needed help.  That their houses

were made of guns.  Gun-walled.  We drove by abandoned

homes and I’d think of abandoned people.  And my

mother said angels are anyone in this life who makes

people hurt less.  She said that we get a rush in our blood

when we hurt people, but that it is the evil of everything.

She said that the calm comes when you try to protect

the hurt.  She said this while smoking.  She smoked like

a chimney in a house that was on fire.  She’d get mid-

night calls from people who were suicidal and I remember

hearing her whispering in the other room when I was little.

I remember asking her, “What is suicide?” and it was near

Christmas and the lights were blinking behind her and she

started crying, not saying anything, just bawling, and I was

so little that I thought that was her response.  I thought that

the answer to “What is suicide?” is a brutality of tears.

And maybe that is the only true response.  I wish I could

paint it for you, the pain, how beautiful those lights were,

the music on softly in the background, something promising.

Ron Riekki

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to Holy Fuck’s “Lovely Allen.”