Self-care
I’d never even heard the word before,
or had ignored it, had walked right by
without waving to it, had instead just
focused on the helicopter on fire that
I seemed to carry around from town
to town, as if I didn’t mind carrying
all of those tons, third-degree burns
on my shoulders, how good it felt to
start to put it out, to not even have
the flames extinct, but just to begin
to have some of that haunting fading,
how light, how healing, how I grew
in height, stood taller, stand taller,
just from one little thing, as simple
as throwing out the cigarette pack,
scheduling that appointment, going
to the store and getting the best
flowers you can find. So simple.
• • •
Sometimes I Put My Foot in My Mouth and
my knees in my mouth and my head in my mouth and
my mouth in my mouth and I put my youth in my feet
and then put them in my spleen and then put them in
my mouth, how I have cleared a room with a thought,
how often I’ve gotten trampled by mouths, eaten by
feet, how I fell six feet in a graveyard, found myself
dead to a city, excommunicated, how I wasn’t even
allowed to communicate, had to just sit there, mouth-
less, head-less, knee-less, with all of these feet I had
swallowed, wondered what I was going to do with
them once I figured out a way to have humanity let
me back in, but it hasn’t happened yet, so I count
body parts, arrange myself into various Frankenstein
postures: the monster at the laundromat, the monster
at the strip club, the monster at the funeral parlor or
the massage parlor or another sort of parlor. There
are so many parlors, but just this one monster, cut
up, rearranged, puzzle done wrong, and I look in
the mirror, and try to smile, but realize it’s my foot
across my face, horizontal, kicking myself for what
I’ve said . . . I put my feet together and pray to God.
• • •
In this poem, I’m writing about those killed when I was in the military, but
I’m refusing to be tragically sad, refusing to have it be
where I get done with this poem and want to run to a bar;
instead I’m going to remember Mundy when his wife was
pregnant and he was alive and the world was alive and I
am alive and my PTSD counselor is alive and I am alive
and she keeps telling me to breathe, because being able
to breathe is massive, and whoever keeps sending me
the stupid gun holster spam when I’d never in hell ever
own a gun and sure as hell never own a holster, well,
that person doing that is still alive and thank God for
being alive and God is alive and I’ve done so many
stupid things myself, including not being able to hold
in my piss, and just going, right there, struggling to
get my key in the lock, looking down the hall, seeing
a neighbor standing there, but not looking at me, as
people do, and sometimes, maybe, it’s good if we don’t
look at each other, especially that moment, how quiet
it is when you pee in your own pants, how even librarians
wouldn’t shh at you, and how I only did that one other
time in my entire life, in boot camp, because boot camp
was a hell, but it also was stupid, with the stupid drill
instructor instructing us on the stupidest things, like bed-
making and shoe-shining and raccoon-watching and
truck-riding and ghost-policing and sky-tanking and
sometimes I wake up and I say dumb things in my head
like Suicide isn’t so bad and then I wake up and I’m sane
and I say things in my head like I’m gonna go hiking
and then I do and the earth is a chocolate flower, it’s
a stuffed blanket, a plush Grinch, and I’m kissed by
nature and no one makes out better than the wind.
• • •
If You Want to Get Famous, the Quickest Way is Poetry
It doesn’t work if you write the poems.
You need to get other people to write the poems
about you. If you can get a few thousand people
to do that, I guarantee fame. It’s a bit of a pyramid
scheme, and by that, I mean that the pyramids are
a big scheme because you can’t even live in them
anymore. It’s like if they took the apartment complex
where you live now and turned it into a museum;
your first thought would be: Why? (You know what
I mean.) But you probably should stop reading this
and start emailing your friends to get them to write
poems about you. The best thing about fame is all
of the groupies. A groupie is a person who is part
of a group. And that specific group is a collection
of people who want to have sex with you. So that
is kind of nice. If you like sex. And fame. Like
most people. If you don’t like sex or fame, then
you should probably just write the poems yourself.
• • •
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). His previous appearance in BoomerLitMag led to a Pushcart Prize.