(Mercy) online, when I listen to poets reading their poems, I always skip
By Ron Riekki
(Mercy) online, when I listen to poets reading their poems, I always skip
to the middle. I know, I know, I know, I’m supposed
to listen to the whole poem, and maybe, now, some-
one will pay me back and skip to the end of this poem,
or not read it at all, but instead, just glance at it, allowing
the eyes to brush up again the letters, but not take them in,
and the poem will still exist. It’s still here. It’s still,
meditating on the page, flowers growing up around
its edges, just like tombstones in a cemetery, and, yes,
this poem is dead when you are not keeping it alive,
a sort of CPR to come back to it, to press on the heart
of the stanza, crushing it so gently, so rhythmically,
how each line is a breath, how there is a pulse, if it works,
and then, later, exhausted, you close the book, the page,
and the poem dies, but doesn’t, exists still, cuddled up
to the poem across the page or asleep in the darkness
of the internet, waiting to be awakened, like a zombie,
tired, and aging infinitely, so that there seems to be less
meaning with age, the way that my grandmother told me
that people talk through her on elevators as if she doesn’t
exist, telling me that some people think she already is
a ghost, and she is, and isn’t, and I am, and I’m not,
this strange realization that all of our exterior skin,\
its furthest layer to the surface is all dead skin cells,
so that our outermost edges are ghost, like this poem
is a ghost, alive so temporarily, so often unread, so
often nothing, but only briefly, so briefly alive when
someone graces it—you, God, you are God now, if
a gentler, smaller, tinier, less significant God, but you
are a God and you have kept me alive for a bit. Merci.
Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki's listening to Fast Computers' "Sweden Hasn't Changed, You Have."
