I get my body talked through on elevators,
as if no one saw me, and my uncle sawed the couch
in half in his living room when he found out he was getting
divorced, was out on parole, got put back in for ten years,
and I do patrol as a security EMT for a hazmat center where the center
cannot hold, and I’m told during the interview that I can’t be afraid
of heights and a coworker told me I have to lift weights and
during the interview I’m asked if I’m OK with bad neighborhoods;
I sleep in a garage with no heat, no hot water, six of us, mattresses on floor,
on the same block as a slaughterhouse, and my roommate likes to yell,
fuck the south! and I’m from a north so north that you take one step
and you’re in Canada, you’re in the kitchen of Santa, you’re not glued
to the TV ‘cause there’s no TV, my ancestors had their eyes iglooed
to the aurora borealis, a hundred ghosts in the sky, roaring beauty, and here,
in the United States of Ameraser, we’re ghosts, ghosted, lost, searching job posts
but it’s all minimum wage, no health insurance when I work in health,
hell, fuck it, I’ll take another graveyard shift. A coworker says,
You know, we’re the only white guys here. And I reply, I’m not white.
Ron Riekki
Ron Riekki’s books include U.P. (Ghost Road Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press). He co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited And Here (MSU Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book).
