Ron Riekki- Three Poems

Un-unemployment

The people who lost their jobs didn’t

lose them.  They are still right there,

easily found.  You can’t lose something

that big.  These aren’t car keys we’re

talking about.  These are the things that

make car keys possible.  The car keys

aren’t missing either.  They are non-

existent.  Or actually, they exist, but

the car no longer exists.  So the key

is worthless.  Or not worthless, but

worth less.  Much less.  It’s just a key.

No door.  No engine.  It’s like a pill

without a body.  A wolf without a pig.

The wolf just sits there.  It takes a deep

breath, worthless.  Worth less.  Just air

sitting in its lungs.  A brick house

flipping it off.  A brick house just

lettin’ it all hang out.  The lady’s stacked

and that’s a fact and by stacked we mean

flesh, which has connotations of Shylock,

lawyers, bloody show, butcher shops,

and other implications of work.

The Paramedic Said, “Doctors are Stupid,”

which isn’t exactly a stunning sentence in and of

itself.  Just doctors and stupidity.  Nothing much more

to the thought.  Gastroenterologists somewhere are discussing

epistemology, but this medic wants to make things simple.

Just M.D.s and dumb.  An equal sign.  A taut tautology.

For tots.  “Thems is dummies.”  And the Headless Horseman

is out there somewhere complaining about Ichabod Cranes,

jealous of his head.  “Ichabod Cranes have heads.”  And

they do.  A big one.  Or not big.  A normal size one.

But big compared to someone who just has air for a head.

In fact, the Headless Horseman does have a head,

if you count oxygen.  Which he doesn’t need to breathe,

because that’s what he is.  The paramedic has killed seven

people.  He tells us this in class.  A sense of pride.

Because he’s saved around a thousand or two.  Maybe three.

Maybe not.  Maybe less.  Maybe less than one head.

On the Train from the Czech Republic to Hungary

I sit, with a cold

forming in my chest.

It’s counting to three-

thousand.  Outside

the window, the ghosts

of trees kick by.


Short bio: Ron Riekki wrote the novel U.P. and edited The Way North (Wayne State University Press, http://wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/way-north, a 2014 Michigan Notable Book).