Tag: Kevin Ridgeway

BETTER DAYS by Kevin Ridgeway

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

BETTER DAYS

My childhood best friend lives
in Colorado now, and I haven’t
seen him since we were both fourteen.
I haven’t seen any of the few friends
I had from the old seedy little
Southern California bedroom
community I grew up in and the sad,
paint chipped walls of its one story houses—
windows lined with bars and overgrown
lawns yellowed by the relentless sun.
Among scattered detritus in the gutters
were lemons and oranges reduced to pulp,
littering the street after we picked them
off of trees and chucked them
as our sporting, prepubescent sacrifice
at the asphalt altar of the 1990s wasteland
we roamed through, the concrete
hot enough to have us dance up
and down in our bare feet, away
from the domestic miseries we
all sought to one day escape.
Most of us were school yard rejects,
bullied by the worst of the worst—
but my friends and I enjoyed our own
moments of delinquency, like the time
we broke into what we had thought
was an abandoned haunted house
and the owner caught us—
when he asked us for our names
and our parents’ phone numbers,
in the age before cell phones,
intent on letting our parents know
what we thought we could get away with,
I was the first to lie, giving him a phoney
name and telephone number. My friends
all followed suit and we laughed about
that old fool for years. Until I stopped
seeing my friends, not just because
some of them moved away, but because
we no longer had anything in common.
I have no idea what happened to them
other than my best friend, Simon,
who I’m no longer close to but who
I matter enough to for him to have sent
the largest floral arrangement on display
at my mother’s funeral, the chapel
as quiet as what we once thought had
been a haunted house in our old suburb,
but was a life abandoned instead,
in a once promising world that had already
seen better days before we all got there.

*

Kevin Ridgeway’s books include Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press). His work has been published in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Slipstream Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Trailer Park Quarterly and Talking River Review, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, California.

Two Poems by Kevin Ridgeway

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

POEM FOR LATCHKEY CHILDREN

At nightfall, before Mom got home
from work, I wouldn’t turn on
any of the lamps. Our television
played old movies to light
the living room while I plopped
down into a beanbag chair on the floor,
duct taped in five different places.

Turner Classic Movies
and overdue library books
kept me company when
the rest of the living world failed me,
on dark noir screens without parents
where I felt safer than I ever did,
a warm place lit by celluloid dreams.

I grew up, my mother retired
and then she died—that’s when
they locked us out of the house
we used to lock ourselves in
after we had no choice but to sell it.
I looked in the window
I used to look out of,
the room empty because
we took everything in there
that we could and sold the rest,
so find a place to lock yourself in
while you can, lost in reels
of old movies and classic texts
until you find yourself out here
with the rest of the world,
when you no longer have a choice
but to unlock your fear and face it.

*

BABY’S FIRST NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

Mom gave birth
to a chainsaw nightmare:
a son who dresses as her
for Halloween,
a son who cleaned the house
in a teenaged manic episode
until it was spic and span
telling her not to make a mess
or she’s grounded
a son who complained
she wasn’t invested in his future
while he walked four miles
to school every goddamn day
to rescue himself from
breathing in hairball grime
to exhale white trash guilt
in primal screams of shame
against walls where
photographs of family
I never met in this life
all hung dead, an audience
for a kid who locked himself
inside alone long enough
to chop through all the scenery
my stay-at-home television father
influenced me to stage
my amateur hour around
until she found me there
bleeding out lost daydreams
the doctors told her
in the emergency room
that I inherited a shipwreck

*

Kevin Ridgeway’s latest books are Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and A Ludicrous Split 2 (with Gabriel Ricard, Back of the Class Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Heavy Feather Review, Sho Poetry Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly and Beat Not Beat: California Poets Screwing on the Beat Tradition (Moon Tide Press), among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.