Kevin Ridgeway

The League of Distinguished Gentlemen

It’s wall to wall testosterone
underneath the eaves
of an old house
in the heart of Cambodia Town,
dried out & dope sick
alcoholic & addicted men
smoke cigarettes
& drink mud strong coffee,
listening to different songs
on their phones at the same time:
LL Cool J does battle
with Hagar era Van Halen,
but nobody wins here
in a place where the main objective
is not staying sober, going back to school
& getting a job but meeting women online
with the hope of a midnight fuck behind
the Home Depot up on Signal Hill
overlooking the entire city
as it falls prey to the sins of the night.
It's daytime here in the land of darkness,
& nobody’s getting laid because
women are wise enough
not to fall for 21st century
deadbeat men scratching lottery tickets
at seven AM when the energy has
false hope, before the mosquitos fly in
& the patio turns into a ghost town. 
Only the sounds of television
soap operas, The Price is Right
& the snores of men are heard,
men who all forgot that time
gave them a chance beyond
the blood-stained concrete where
daydream gambles go up in smoke
& burn into dead end nightmares. 

Sitting At the Dining Room Table
With Somebody Else's Grammy

She has a stoic, quiet judgment in the awkward,
nervous face of my many wrong answers
during her pre-holiday supper interrogation. 
Gram's thick Massachusetts accent
makes me feel miscast in a Norman Rockwell
brush stroke, a Christmas tree towering above us
as she orders me not to curse during
the Christian holiday like I'm a juvenile delinquent.  
Her lecture over my smoking habit leads me
to stare into the eyes of an animatronic Teddy Bear
while it plays a toy saxophone in the background.
The pot brownie her granddaughter gave me
has kicked in.  I'm paranoid that Gram can tell.

News From the Hothouse

Dad told me it was hotter than Hades
inside Chino State Prison this week—
zero air conditioning & insects galore
running through his hair, up his nostrils,
along his mustache & into his mouth. 
The weather makes him faint,
his medical issues threatened,
the warden’s promises of moving
the inmates on his yard
to a refrigerated unit that meets up
to safety standards for those like
him who have serious illnesses
is meeting constant delays. 
He tells me of a fellow cancer patient,
recovering from chemotherapy
who began to have trouble breathing
& it took the medical staff an eternity
to get to their unit to assist him. 
The inmates pushed him in his wheelchair
for med call.  Someone nudged at him
while my Dad & all the inmates looked on.
“Jughead!” people called to him. 
“Jughead, wake up!”
The guards yelled to stand away
from him.  Everyone already knew
he was gone before the nurse
finally arrived to pronounce him dead,
a story my Dad ended by telling me
"yeah, it’s fucked up in here”

 

Kevin Ridgeway's latest books are Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and A Ludicrous Split 2 (with Gabriel Ricard, Back of the Class Press).  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Heavy Feather Review, Sho Poetry Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly and Beat Not Beat:  California Poets Screwing on the Beat Tradition (Moon Tide Press), among others.  He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.