Barre Daze, poem by Kevin Ridgeway

Don­ald Fagen croons from fifth avenue

about hav­ing a tran­sis­tor radio and a large sum

of mon­ey to spend as we jet along Main Street

in our ragged white Cut­lass Supreme stained

with the burn of mud and snow from the winter

and spring back roads, my ex wife at the wheel

behind her black rimmed glass­es, her eyebrow

raised as beau­ti­ful­ly as John Belushi's; storefronts

are shut­tered except for Ruth's Din­er, with inbred

apple pie cher­ry puffed heads with star­ing possum

eyes in cov­er­alls dust­ed by gran­ite from the nearby

quar­ries we park our car in at night to get stoned;

we're en route to the Shaw's Super­mar­ket in Montpelier

that sells our favorite hum­mus, and we scare off the

deer at night in our dri­ve­way who come to drink from

the small creek we get drunk and swim in, the neighbor

lady yelling at her kids at far too ear­ly an hour for the

hang­overs we earned from a whole case of

Long Trail Dou­ble Bag ale we split watch­ing Joseph

Camp­bell videos filmed on Sky­walk­er Ranch and old

episodes of Star Trek, and so we threw a half-drunk

beer bot­tle "pho­ton tor­pe­do" at that loud, roly poly,

mu mu clad klin­gon that shat­tered against one of the

trees in our back­yard woods, but every­one was too out

of it from the bugs and the humid­i­ty to notice or much care

up here in red­neck space where no one can here you scream.

Kevin Ridge­way was born and raised in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where he cur­rent­ly lives and writes. He spent many years in the rur­al north­east, where he hopes to some­day return. His work can be found or is forth­com­ing in Chi­ron Review, Nerve Cow­boy, LUMMOX, Right Hand Point­ing and The Mas Tequi­la Review. His lat­est chap­books are On the Burn­ing Shore (Arroyo Seco Press) and Rid­ing Off Into That Strange Tech­ni­col­or Sun­set: Dal­las-FT. Worth Poems (The Week­ly Weird Monthly).