3 poems by Ron Riekki

My Best Friend Calls Me

She’s in Boston.  Hates Boston.  Love/hates
Boston.  Used to live in Austin.  Said she feels
like she’s stuck in Dr. Seuss with the places
she’s lived.  Says next she’s going to move to
Gluppity-Pawston.  She’s in a good mood.
A great mood.  A I-just-saw-the-sun-get-born
mood.  She’s been through it all, she’s told me,
through it and in it and of it and on it and down it.
But today, she says, using her best Neil Diamond
voice: Today!  Today she’s doing great.  She just
got her dream job.  And, she says, something bigger.
She told me before, how she stopped dancing.  Used
to.  Professionally.  Ballet.  And then, she told me,
she suffered from what her counselor told her is
the deadliest diagnosis: anorexia nervosa.  And,
she stopped dancing.  She said she had to concentrate
on survival.  And she survived.  Gave up what she’d
taken forever to master.  En pointe and fouette, all
gone.  The disappearance of grand jete and grand
adage and everything grand.  This overwhelming
smallness, ghostness, and this fight she said she could
only do if everything from before faded, and so they
faded, and she moved from the ballast of her past
to this new life, this social work life, where she said
she’s going to help people who have went through
what she went through, and, she said, she tells me on
the phone, that she just pirouetted.  Did it before she even
realized what she was doing.  And she said it felt heavenly,
clunky and perfect and healthy and heavenly, and so she
called me, waltzed to her cell on the bed and called me, her
voice full of hope and resilience and love and just everything.

On the day I got out of the military,

I did a cartwheel in the parking lot.
In full uniform.  When I got out
of the military.  When I went in
the military, I remember this sick

feeling in my stomach, like I knew
what was going to happen.  I didn’t
know what was going to happen.
In Desert Storm, we had three people

killed in the manner of a few minutes.
When I got out of the military, I did
a cartwheel in the parking lot.  My feet
touching the sun.  My feet on fire.

My feet now my head.  I crashed
to the ground.  I kissed the ground.
The fist of the ground.  My old boss
looking at me in the window.  Old.

In high school

a girl I had a crush on
asked me to dance.

I said no.  I was scared.
I dream sometimes

that I never spent any time
in prison.  I remember

all of the bodies in there,
how little they moved.