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(Negaunee) In my hometown, there was a fence



If you jumped the fence, there was another hometown
over there. Swear to God. A hometown for somebody.

Spiders, I guess. Everything was rust. It was kinda
exactly like my hometown, but it had been volcanoed

with cobwebs. It wasn’t really a ghost town, because
I didn’t see too many ghosts over there. It was weird,

though, because there was no one around, ever,
but there’d be beer cans everywhere. Apparently,

spiders drink beer. Or ghosts. Maybe the ghosts all
hid when they saw us. Underage ghosts running

from underage kids and underage spiders, except
all spiders are underage. Most spiders die when

they’re about two years old, which would be sad
if they weren’t so creepy. And then there’s

ghosts – those things never die. They’re like
the opposite of spiders. I think that’s why they

go hand-in-hand so well. It’s like yin and yang.
Which was my hometown and that other home-

town. How that fence was a mirror and we’d step
through the mirror and get drunk on nature too.











Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), U.P. (Ghost Road Press). He’s edited eight books, including Here (Michigan State University Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book). Right now, Riekki’s listening to Nick Cave's "The Ship Song (2010 Remastered Edition)."

See more of his work in 9.3 and 5.2 and 4.4 and Pocket Poems Anthology





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