Ron Riekki
The Doctor Tells Me Not to Worry about My Thyroid
because I can't afford to do anything about it anyway.
The books in the V.A. waiting room have been stolen
for drug money. I walk out to my car and it looks like
it has been smoking a pack-a-day for eighteen years,
the door coughing when I open it, and I drive deep
into Los Angeles, its nicotine everything, and at home
my apartment looks like it's coming apart, as if its name
meant to explain it all, and I'm coming apart but in a good
way, where your past gets left in the dust, and the dust
feels like what you see after a motorcycle has ripped by.
Bio
Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).