In the Navy, they made me pick rabbits
out of the barbed wire, the fight of it,
insisting on staying out in the sun even
though they were dead, not wishing to
enter into the bag that I was in too.

And I painted the bottom of the stairs,
because S&M was part of so many
of their rituals, all of which climaxed
onboard ship, going shellback, crossing
the equator, all of this women’s

clothing appearing from nowhere,
eggs put in my mouth, smashed,
another E-3 duct taped to a chair,
food left to rot for weeks, dumped
on his head, and, then, emesis,

and, then, aspiration, meaning,
because I was a corpsman, that
he vomited and choked on his
own vomit and how they did CPR
on him, revived him, this odd

feeling, everyone in nightgowns
and sundresses with the sky trying
to dismember the ocean, and failing,
and I talk to none of them anymore,
decades later, our bodies bonfired by time.

©  

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).