Homeboy Chicken Weasel and other poems by Kevin Ridgeway

says he got her digits
13th-stepping at an AA meeting
that he was going to try them out
after he phones his sponsor
tonight, ready to fuck her
brains out in place of heroin
and tweek to cheer himself up
until the day comes when
he’s only dialing her,
sponsorless, high as a kite
and ready to squeak out
a dick full of impending
spiritual death

---

Victoria Bought Me a Corn Dog and Tried to Infect Me With Her Pretty Little Illness

she partied with D. Boon from the Minutemen,
a cult punk rock group from the eighties.
Boon’s buried at Green Hills Memorial Park,
where Bukowski is buried. we plan a trip
up there to pay respects to them both, but
Victoria starts giving me shit for looking
stoned at group after she gave me percocets
and seemed to be grateful for my company,
despite her consistent questions about
Kareem, her outpatient sweetheart who she
keeps dumping. she refuses a trip to said
graveyard, makes me feel guilty for having
an Uncle to go visit the coming weekend.
She seems to not know one inch of my pain
after a lonesome paw at my vulnerable sobriety
left me further puked out in my mouth over
the illness of long term mental illness treatment
that I pray to grow well enough to move on from
visit those long dead men up there overlooking
the ocean to simply tell Buk thanks for the inspiration
and thank D. Boon for giving Victoria and I something
interesting to talk about when she wasn’t dragging
me along for another sick trip further into the codependent
world of brokenhearted brain eaters.

---

The Last Picture Show

In the courthouse holding cell,
An OG told me his brother
told him that this life is no movie,
And it doesn’t have to end like one.
Then he told me to stay out of trouble
And out of the movies.

---

Legs Man

hopelessly true,
I am desperate to
appreciate a pair of
shapely gams without
ogling them too much.
One therapist who I have a crush on at group
always wears power heels but always trousers

but one day
she wore a short dress
and I listened to everything she had to
challenge me with in group that day
without being caught losing eye contact
as I moved down her thighs and over
strong knees shaping into calves that
I had to excuse myself from group from,
her breakthroughs at my psychological knots
and the pitched tent that I needed to get rid of
as she giggled at my insecurities I claimed were issues other
than her crossed bouquet of distraction I ran away from,
just like all of my other issues that stuck out like humiliating boners
from puberty in need of hidden deflation

---

Girls! Girls! Girls!

My unmedicated, schizophrenic roommate shows me photographs on his discount cellular phone of women in the Ukraine who all want to be his next wife. And I want to warn him that they are fraudulent grifters who don’t have none of that proclaimed bodankadonk.

He keeps me awake through the night with the overhead bedroom light turned on until he writhes up in down in furious masturbation while I lay there and wince through a five second cum whimper of my own that tickles my cock as I imagine a laundromat giddy up between me and a mamacita in the worst Long Beach hood of relentless Gs and soulless OGs who scream and fire ammunition while he hacks off to women who look like shopping mall mannequins while I pray for a nice girl who tolerates my curious fetishes and flashes me her sensuous and beautifully flawed sexual humanity like the woman I lost to addiction and heartbreak months earlier that makes all this delusional jonesing for phony women harder to tolerate than the world of real women ready to reject me out there as I trudge long and hard to mend a broken heart, or to be numb enough to its unfixable napalm gory hamburger sayonara and a lonesome road to a wiser plain of existence than this stupid fucking one I’m climbing out of without tenderness for harsh love but brutish insanity ready to beat what’s left inside of me to stay alive for something other than the fleeting cheap escape from pain that took my love for this world away.

 

Kevin Ridgeway is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee who lives and writes in Long Beach, CA. Recent work of his has appeared in Chiron Review, Spillway, Nerve Cowboy, Trailer Park Quarterly, Big Hammer, Lunmox and San Pedro River Review, among others. He is the author of six chapbooks of poetry. The latest, Contents Under Pressure, is now available from Crisis Chronicles Press.