BRAIN MATTER
chow
time came
before
the sun went
down
on L.A. County Jail,
where
people try
to
trade shots
of
instant coffee
for
fruit in order to make pruno.
I
had just been taken off
suicide
watch and had been
stuffed
into a yellow
mental
health
smock
for dings
like
us or whatever else
the
deputies laughingly called us.
Everyone’s
favorite meal
was
called brain matter,
our
tray canvasses
decorated
in gray
hamburger
and
a
decadent brown
mystery
sauce
over
curly noodles.
We
slurped from
other
inmates’ scraps
of
a kind of meat
we
couldn’t beat
after
lights out
and
we all passed out
fat,
happy and behind bars.
I
started to almost miss
the
god forsaken place
in
the cab headed away
from
downtown LA
en
route to the suburb
where
my uncle
reluctantly
said
I
could sleep
on
his couch.
That
night I had to start
proving
that my brain
mattered
more than
the
way I treated it
with
the disintegration
of
what I was really made of:
the
armor I inherited
with
a straight poker face
and
everything my father
taught
me in his old prison
stories
of bad food,
toilet
hooch, racism,
murder,
riots, lock down
and
solitary confinement,
but
he never mentioned
brain
matter, which
I
want to ask him
about
while lung cancer
brings
his life sentence
to
a close as he digests
his
last supper and the epic
wrongs
of his life
over
a glass of toilet hooch
he
uses to forget and come
as
close to death in hot pursuit
of
the double dragon
who
ran off with my
father’s
brain to another
place
that doesn’t matter.
Kevin Ridgeway lives and writes in Long Beach, CA. He is the author of the poetry collection "Too Young to Know" (Stubborn Mule Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, Trailer Park Quarterly, The Cape Rock, Spillway, Up the River, Suisun Valley Review, KYSO Flash, Home Planet News, Cultural Weekly, Big Hammer, Misfit Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.
Nice.
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