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Ron Riekki Poetry

            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.”











I’m Tall

by Ron Riekki


so tall
that I get asked how tall I am
every day,

so tall
that children point at me
in supermarkets
and their super-mothers
tell them in super-language
that it’s not polite to do that,

so tall
that it’s my turn
to attack the village,
so I march across the forest
crunching trees with every step
and when I get there
they have all their pitchforks
ready
and their torches
aflame
and they wait for me to make the next move
so I tell them
to please
look,
to please do the research
and you’ll find
that all those people killed by police

were tall
and, yes,
I know they’re minorities too,
but they’re

also tall.
All of them.
I know.
I always look up their height
after I find out someone was murdered by the police
and over and over again
they’re guilty
of having a large body,
one that must be stopped
by any means necessary
even if they are just
peacefully
walking
through a park.



I Have the Same Birthday as L. Frank Baum


and I look like the Scarecrow too,
walk like a scarecrow with
 my 50% disabled veteran body,
my tremors
where I shake

like it’s the cusp
of the tornado
 and I write too,
except I’m unknown,
stuffed with straw,

hanging there
for all the world
 to discover me,
take me down,
take me to the castle

where all of my dreams
will be given to me
 only to discover
that they were always right there,
stuffed inside my straw-hearted chest.



I Listen to Blonde Redhead’s “Silently” for the Tenth Time in a Row


and when Kazu dances
it makes me remember when I could dance
and when Kazu dances
it makes me remember when I could walk
and when Kazu dances
it makes me remember when I was loved
and it was good,
like a song,
that love,
how she kissed me at the sink
and we fell to the floor,
my hands all wet,
her laughing carmine lips,
her intense love of God,
and how she left me,
a year later,
because, she said, I didn’t love God enough,
and I remember
all the hollowness that came
after she was gone
and this revelation:
now.

So simple:
Now.

Now.

Now.



Chronic Pain


I look at the abandoned building.
It looks like it just got out of prison,
like the building had just spent its tenth year inside another building.
Its glass-shattered front window with a couple of remaining hanging shards that look like teeth
and the window moves, the building speaking to me, asking if I have a chimney,
if I have a spare chimney it could have,
but I tell it I gave up smoking years ago,

and inside I can see its carpet looking so thirsty.
I don’t know what to do.
So I stand there
and talk to the building.
We talk about our pain,
how bad our lungs and living rooms hurt
and the heat that radiates in my head and in its kitchen

and the window yawns
because it’s getting late,
and I walk away
and it hurts to walk,
but I’m thankful for my legs
and it’s thankful for its roof
and we’re blessed with gratitude.



She Said We Shouldn’t Have to Say ‘I Love You’ (for Amélie)


so she didn’t.
She said it was in our actions.
So I tried to see her love
when she turned off the lamp
at night
and I tried to see her love
in the strange way
that she would fall asleep
with her cell phone in her hand,
the light glowing
like it was coming from her angelic
center.



BIO

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). Right now, Riekki’s listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.”







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