I can’t eat cold chicken.
by Ron Riekki
It comes from the war where
we’d get fed cold chicken
every night. I’d ask, Isn’t cold
chicken dangerous? There’d be
no reply. Maybe they were
thinking, War is dangerous.
I don’t know. We didn’t speak
much. It was safer that way.
The worry was that bombs
would get dropped on us,
because we were dropping
bombs on them, and the worry
was that they’d attack us,
storm the building, so that,
when I was security and I’d
look into the jungle I could see
scythes of eyes staring back at me,
and, worse, the real worry, I’ll be honest,
was us, the them of us, how there was this
secret hazing that was occurring, said to
try to keep us on our toes, where they,
we, any of us, could come up behind you,
grab you, duct tape your mouth shut,
your hands to your chair, and then
they’d raise you, haul you through
the hall outside where there was
a fence waiting for what they, we,
they called ‘crucifixion,’ where they
would wrap your wrists to the chain
link and then they could do anything
they wanted to you. It was just ‘hazing.’
That’s all. They’d leave you there
for hours, the insects coming out,
and no ability to swat them,
and, this habit, this tradition,
this stupidity, where they’d take
old food left behind the building
in buckets just for this occasion, slop,
rotted, and pour it over your head,
into your mouth, which, I’d warn,
could cause aspiration, but nobody
listened, and it was too loud to speak
what with the B52 engines owning
the sky and I never participated, and
they came for me one night, but I ran,
into the jungle, escaped.
Bállet (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Translation of a Poem by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää)
“the North chose us”
—Nils-Aslak Valkeapää,
from “I have no beginning, no end”
An Anishinaabe elder told me once how important it is to turn off
the world, the city world, the skyscraping world, with its intense lack of colors
when you consider the multitude of greens in the forests, where the visions
wait for us, and by us I mean the indigenous, and I have spent too much of my life—
and that’s the correct phrase, a sad spending—drowned, when the woods are exquisite
and honest and real and here and now and my Saami ancestors tell us
that we should live like reindeer, become reindeer, and I am trying to become reindeer
and bear and elk and Arctic foxes and trees and rocks and fishes
and birds and birds and peace and more peace and more birds
and, when we were sane, forest-sane, we decided
that we
would marvel
at the night
in the North
the far North, where it is just us,
with the rest of the world so far in the distance, so polluting, and so strained
Sichuan (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Poem by Hussain Ahmed)
“to boil”
—Hussain Ahmed,
from “Love Story”
I was not born
in China but I was born in China. I remember the leafs
when we kissed and I remember the end,
the taxi cab driver with
his off-key karaoke as we both sat in back and neither of us would answer
the other’s questions. We met in the archived
sections of our lives. Soft legs
as thin as my mouth
and we tried to share each other’s history
and sex
but it rained
so hard that all we have left is this water.
Máttar (With Each Line’s Final Word from a Poem by Mario Meléndez)
“‘Get up, you have to come see this’”
—Mario Meléndez, as translated by Eloisa Amezcua
from “Future Memories”
for Bamewawagezhikaquay
I learned at an early
age of my Saami ancestors. My father told me
this:
that the stars
are reindeer. And then this revelation
that every so often one gets away, this thought
of falling stars
as escape, as flight,
him saying that one day I’d run across the sky.
BIO
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 IDLES’ “Danny Nedelko.”
