Finland
I’m writing this on an ice cube, well, to be more accurate,
an icicle octagon, a wintery stop sign, the one near my home
in northern Michigan, where we moved because it was most
like Kuusamo, because we like places where there aren’t many
people, but a lot of snow. It’s difficult to write on an ice cube,
but no tougher than heating your home with wood. I remember
hauling wood, helling wood, being wood, how my childhood
was really childwood, the slaving over slivers, was my dad
and gloves, the path to the woodpile so memorized in my mind
that I see it now, daily, before bed, during bed, after bed, even
the few weeks when I moved into this apartment and didn’t have
a bed. But there it is. The pile. The wood. My dad. The sun.
The moon. The empty sky. The full sky. My dad would look
up at the sun and say, “Where’s its chimney?” We’d see God
hauling wood to the sun. He’d see each star as a sauna. He’d
sing the Finnish National Anthem, which began with “Our land,
our land” which really meant “Our wood, our wood,” and then
the next line—“Our fatherland”—my father singing this, his
voice echoing, father, land, fatherwood, sunwood, fatherGod,
the song, the heat, the cold, how they clashed, the song caught
fire, the sun ran out of heat, winter owned our lives, the house,
everything, and we walked backwards, to avoid the wind, and
got inside, and when I think of place I think of fireplace, of how
hot my back would be, my toes frozen, my father grabbing me
by the face, saying, straight into my iris, “You’re Finn! Finn!”
his hands so cold, my nose so sooty, my life so strange, night
like lightning, snow like heat, God like fury, the house so full.
• • •
My Brother Dares Me to Look Up the Word ‘Devil’ in the Dictionary
as if something bad might happen.
I remember his acting, how intense he was,
this fear, that I wonder if it was real.
We were young,
so young,
where I couldn’t walk home at night,
the hill by our house
so terrifying,
as if it was the top of a head of a giant,
how I worried the hill would start to move,
grow,
become a face, a body, monstrous, as big as our state, hovering, above me, its teeth the color of thermometers, my cousins torn in half hanging from its mouth, I’d see it all so clearly.
I turned the pages of the book,
the dictionary,
this ordinary thing
shifted
into a book of magic spells,
how you could just look at a word
and it might come alive.
I remember getting to that page,
my spine unable to stand anymore.
What was I doing?
My brother encouraging me
by saying, “Don’t do it.”
I ran my finger slowly down the page, looking.
• • •
A Friend Wanted to Rent the Worst Movie Ever Made
We searched a long time.
this was back when you could search in person,
with real films right there in front of you,
so you could touch them,
the boxes,
not empty,
films inside,
a town so small that they could trust you,
and we judged the titles,
wanting titles that made us moan with grief,
titles that made no sense,
horrible puns,
so many bad titles
that it was even harder than choosing a good film,
so much competition
and we got it down to three movies,
all in our hands,
looking at the front covers:
the skulls,
the wooden table,
the knife.
Why would a front cover only consist of a wooden table?
It seemed so much worse than knives or skulls.
Just a table?
That’s it?
We didn’t even read the back.
What could be worse than a movie about a table?
It’s not about a table, my friend said, it’s a trick.
What’s the trick?
We didn’t know.
We set the skull and knife down.
Those movies were guaranteed to have skulls and knives.
We didn’t want guarantees.
Horror was too easy.
We wanted worse than horror.
We took the movie home.
It was a four-hour documentary.
About a table.
A table just sitting there.
For four hours.
Nothing happened.
The table.
The light changed a little bit maybe.
We watched it all.
Making jokes, laughing. Then not. Then getting silent.
Lost in our thoughts.
• • •
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). Right now he’s listening to Metric’s “Die Happy.”