Reading Kay Ryan’s “Grazing Horses” in Class
Instead of saying “tilts abruptly,”
I said “tits erupting,” the class not
even laughing, and me neither,
the cardiac arrest of it, how there
was no going back, how the breasts
volcanoed whether or not I wanted
them to, how there was an abrupt
tilting at the same time, how two
things can so easily happen even
if one’s a furnace and the other, ice.
My First CT Scan
The painting on the ceiling of trees
scares me, something about the colors,
like LSD, a forest floating horizontally
above me with a radiologist with a beard
with a scowl like a dead bird and
the sound of crickets being pumped in
mixing with the sounds of machinery
you would never find in the woods,
then the nurse insisting I use the wheel-
chair on the way back to the room,
a room as empty as the entire ward
now that it’s 3 a.m., a P.A. and CNA
whispering in their circular station that
reminds me of Star Trek: “What
happened to her?” “She’s dead.”
Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book). Right now, he's listening to The Doors' "Riders on the Storm."