Backyard Apocalypse
is where you’ll find
Don Juan drinking a 40 ounce
of bitter sweet malt liquor
having an adult conversation
with his ex-wife about how
they’re never getting
married again, and he
forgets to light that joint
he promised you if you
went and got him another
40 ounce through
an alleyway where
people go missing,
and you sit there
with his pit bull
dry-fucking your leg
while the former
Mrs. Don Juan moans
beyond the screen door
where Don Juan smothers
her beauty in the adoration
of his beer goggles
and the soft flop
of his appendage
as it attempts to join
it’s ugliness with hers.
Erased by Nostalgia
My Uncle Mike told me to stop
looking in the rear view mirror
and hit the gas forward,
the only sensible way
to live free of my demons
and he drops me off
on a Long Beach street corner,
at the end of the day
I said goodbye
to my childhood home
and found myself
in the cold ghetto
of my adulthood,
never to look back again
at what made it all so full
of such mournful promise.
Mom Never Got a Boob Job
she always said she was going
to sue her employer for screwing
her over and use her settlement
to get herself a boob job,
but the money from that lawsuit
is now my inheritance in the wake
of her demise, and I’m using
that money to get myself a boob job.
Dad Was a Needle Hype
we listened to the Stones
in my Dad’s Ford Ranchero
after he got kicked out of rehab
during a thunder storm
in Long Beach, CA,
on our way back
to my mother’s house
to beg her to give him
another chance. It was
the first time he told me
all about heroin,
and why he would
never be free.
Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press). Recent work has appeared in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Plainsongs, The Cape Rock, Trailer Park Quarterly, Misfit Magazine, Heroin Love Songs, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Spillway, Gasconade Review, South Broadway Ghost Society, San Pedro River Review, The American Journal of Poetry and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.