Poetry by Kevin Ridgeway
Poetry by Kevin Ridgeway
Marty
I saw a photograph of my father taken when he was just five years old. without tattoos on his arm. a clean slate like the one my nephew still enjoys today. long before he cared about what other people think. before he disguised his pain behind a wall of heroin and firearms. and a lifetime before it was my turn to feel the shame outside of a clean slate.
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Grow Up or Die
we keep getting high for no good reason at all you blamed me for wasting the joint we were smoking and taking everything for granted in a very mean city where we could easily get killed after our parents died and we had no place to call home, something;s got to give in order for me to wait for miracles as my mind clears and my life is saved.
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Blacktop Showdown
blood squirted from above my friend Ruben’s right eyebrow where a kid in sagging over sized clothes covered in LA Raiders logo’s stabbed him with a mechanical pencil during an outdoor school pep rally after Ruben told him he needed a Tic Tac for his bad breath in response to the initial Yo Mama joke hurled in our direction that started it all, House of Pain blasting out of a nearby boom box. Ruben squealed trying to extract the pencil from his head while our rival in gold chains turned his attention to me. I rose my trembling hands in surrender and he started squeezing my baby fat tits and poking at the exposed belly button hiding under my t shirt before violently twisting my nipples back and forth in laundry cycles until they went from their natural pink to a deep maroon that glowed in the dark for weeks.
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Underdog Miracle
there is desperation in the voice of a fellow mental patient of mine who waves and hollers out the name of the most beautiful therapist at our day treatment program as she pours her coffee and flashes him a smile he finally won, his sorrow erased.
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The Brat
she speed talks desert rat wisdom that sounds like a garbled language she effortlessly spews forth against the tables outside of the hospital where we gather for therapy. she used to mainline crystal meth and has tremulous hands like mine, either from the drugs or the medications or maybe we were just born this way, but she’s everyone’s hero as she trudges forward on her skateboard like a mumbling warrior of hard-lived witticism and irreverence, this chick who wants to get clean and get her kids back, this little ball of fire that reminds me of an alternate universe version of my mother and who likes Frank Zappa just as much as I do, always skeptical of whatever my current bullshit is and rarely awarding me a laugh for something I said, but when she turns that smile on at you from the middle of a raging tirade at two patients who keep asking for change to buy sodas from the vending machine, this graceful, lovely rebel that we must all bless makes you feel like you count for something in this world.
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PUBLICATIONS & PRIZES
Chapbook:
Burn Through Today (Flutter Press, 2012)
Journals:
Emerge Literary Journal, Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Red Fez, Santa Fe Literary Review, Underground Voices
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