Live Nude Poems

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 “...

The Last Time I Saw My Father's Face My father was bearded and zoned out on psychiatric medication he could not pronounce behind the glass from us in county jail, where he awaited trial. He and my mother argued over why he did what he did until he could only slur insane gibberish.   The guards treated us so much like shit we could still smell it on the drive home, when we both agreed never to visit my father in jail or prison again.   Neither of my parents were there when I got locked up in the same madhouse that swallowed my father whole, but it choked on me and spit me out in a demented miracle no one prayed for but me. Kevin Ridgeway is the author of  Too Young to Know  (Stubborn Mule Press) and nine chapbooks of poetry including  Grandma Goes to Rehab  (Analog Submission Press, UK). His work can recently be found in  Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, San Pedro Rive...

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 wa...

Losing the Human Race everything has become so quiet, illness has struck us at close to midnight  and we've missed out on the happenings  sweet medicine eludes us everyone  is in everyone's fan club but mine those who were are all dead now and i can't even write poems about them yet so i suffer in this little bubble of mine a little bubble that I can't seem to pop and make my body tickle all over on up to my brain where all the useless information is stored and where all the memories torture me and where the future horrifies me and when  my fantasies put me on beautiful journeys that make this hardship of opinions, morals and different tastes in music some of my least favorite things as I pass by that cemetery off the Long Island Railroad in Farmingdale where Coltrane rests and where I traveled back to Southern California after the Big Apple was a mean, smug son of a bitch who hustled me into wanting to run away and hid...