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.”