On Being Left | Ron Riekki

She’s ashamed of my eyes.
She’s left my eyes to the fish.

My lips are abandoned buildings.
My jaw is Detroit.
My feet live below the poverty line.
I am trapped in traps.

She is made of milk and jewels and wind.

I am an X-ray.
My abdomen begs for ghosts, wish it could at least have that.

She dyes her life red, a red that reminds me of earthquakes.

I am lost on the inside of the vase.

She is a Scylla if it was etched in perfection and

I am a dark scab.

She paints pictures with breaths.

I have given my mouth to the dead.

She is the water in movies.

I am deceased and desist.
I wish I could reinvent the time machine, make it work better than our current one: meth.

She would mess up my hair, turn them into vegan cannibals.

I lust for lust.

She stands to my left, somewhere, unseen.
She is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s Sushmita Sen.

I am an animal and a nickname.

The bricks of you get taken when they leave.
A wall that erupts from umbilical to pharynx.
How your lungs get hung, dangling.

And she is the clouds.

Directed by Ribhu Ghosh and produced by Suki Chandhoke, Avtar Productions’ film Katta Ya Goli? was based off of Ron Riekki’s play How to Kill Yourself with a Gun and a Bottle of Pills. Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), U.P. (Ghost Road Press), and Niiji (Cyberwit/Taj Mahal Review, co-written with Sally Brunk).