Skip to main content

Kevin Ridgeway

Nostalgia Porn

A new episode of Silver Spoons
brightened the living room after dinner,
my mother in her room passed out
from a long day of work to make the rent,
my older brother in his room in a fierce
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out trance. I was
always outside in the backyard, pacing
back and forth with my hands on my
head like antennae talking in another
language, in a world far away from
the reality of my father being just a
voice on the phone and the promise
of happiness in adulthood when all
the dreams in my head would come
true and make up for the void I filled
with Fonzi, Gilligan, Bill Murray
and my other friends in the box
I wanted to leap inside of and be
rescued, and my family would all see
me inside the box with a silver spoon
sticking out of my mouth and
a million dollar haircut on my head,
in a time when I would no longer
have to survive on just the weary,
lonesome stardust of daydream reruns.


Kevin Ridgeway’s latest book is “Invasion of the Shadow People” (Luchador Press).  His work has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Plainsongs, Meat for Tea, San Pedro River Review and The American Journal of Poetry, among others.  He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.  




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg  We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip  and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped  the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction  of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true.  We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet  in those moments of a cold November day, we watched  a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat  a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,