2 Poems by Ron Riekki
When Kyle finds a dead homeless guy on the property,
you’d think we’d just invented
electricity. You’d think we’d
just saved the world from alien
attack. You’d think we were
Purple Heart recipients. All he
did was find a corpse. That’s it.
But they congratulated him.
For finding a dead guy. As if
he did something good. Did
something well. All he did was
point. All he did was see a body
with his eyes and then phone it
in. The excitement was like
a knife falling into a sword-
swallower’s birthday cake.
You could tell we wanted it.
We wanted something. All
we did was walk. We wanted
anything. A corpse. Some deer.
A romance. Hope. Anything.
We begged for it. The purgatorial
moon. The endless loops where
the boss watched us on camera
to make sure we hit all the check-
points, some guys cutting it short,
some guys not going into buildings
that they felt were haunted. They’d
fire them quick, the boss saying,
Look, any of you fuckheads believe
in ghosts, tell me now, so I can fire
you immediately. Jesus Christ,
he said, Ghosts!
The fires on the horizon are nearing
and I’m in the guard shack, watching them
nearing, and we have no masks, the ash
falling horizontal, as if the world is on
its side, and the ash is house and the ash
is chair and the ash is car seat and the ash
is roof and floor and wall and all, and my
boss drives up, his headlights hurting, and
he gets out slowly, as if he’s ash, and he is
ash, and he falls horizontally over to me,
enters the guard shack, so small, so claustro-
phobic, in the middle of road, a truck that
hit it once, flattened it, once, the security
officer, luckily, outside, and they built
another, put up poles in the ground to
protect us in the future, for the next truck
that was inevitable, and the boss says,
Can I ask you a question? and I say,
No, and he asks if I’ve ever thought of
suicide, and I can’t believe the question,
that he never asks anything of importance,
never asks anything vulnerable or honest
or real, only talks about cars and whores
and wars and cares about nothing, and
I say, Suicide? And he says, Yeah, and
I ask Why? and he says that he’s going
to make me commit suicide if I don’t
remember to call in on the half hour
with my report, and I forgot, caught
up in the sight of the flames, how they
look like a red highlighter trying to
emphasize horizon, and I tell him
that those are homes over there and
he says, Yeah, the rich, and we stare
at the rich homes that we can’t see
and he looks content and I look at
him looking content and I feel fear.
Ron Riekki has been awarded a Michigan Notable Book, The Best Small Fictions, Shenandoah Fiction Prize, IPPY Award, Red Rock Film Fest Award, Best of the Net finalist, Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Riekki co-edited The Many Lives of The Purge, which is a nominee for The Eiffel Award: The Year’s Best Books on Film. Right now, Riekki's listening to Anadol & Marie Klock's "Magnitude 6.3" on Princeton University's WPRB, even though he's never been to Princeton (or the artist previously known as Princeton).