KEVIN RIDGEWAY

I AM A POEM

It’s not easy to be a poem:
some read you
some dig you
some don’t
some don’t read you at all
some don’t even consider
you a poem
and leave you in
naked ink against a page,
an embarrassment of words.
Some reprint you and don’t ask first,
that’s when people get tired of you:
they thought you were a good poem
but they grew old enough
to realize they were wrong.
You see them from time to time,
but they avoid eye contact
and sometimes they can’t
even remember your name.

WALKING DOWN THE YARD

The guard instructs me to walk straight
and there will be another guard
at the next security checkpoint to hand
over my paperwork and identification to,
who’ll buzz me into Unit A.
Surrounded by barbed wire fences,
for a long stretch I meditate, lost in grass
laying out toward mountainside eternities
like the lives that got away from us.
The gate opens and I walk to a small door
leading into a room full of tables and chairs.
I’m told to sit down and wait, he’ll be out soon.
I stare forward at the row of automat machines
so familiar from visits in my childhood,
when he and I would share an expensive can
of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. My hand rests
over a clear sandwich bag full of coins
and dollar bills, identical to what my mother
would bring years ago when I still came along.
Now she’s dead and I’m alone here, waiting
after sixteen years and a life sentence
to look into the same green eyes as mine,
and tears begin to come to a boil when
I spy the reflection of his wheelchair
in the linoleum floor as they roll him
from behind a makeshift wall like an
imaginary game show, whose announcer
calls out to us both as we hug each other tight,
yelling like on an episode of This is Your Life.

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and The Ghost of Cal Worthington (Beach Chair Press). Recent work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, and Gargoyle Magazine, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.