Death Stunt

one morning
while in a crystal
methamphetamine
twist
eyes bugged out
and pants barely staying up
I stood paranoid guard while
my psychiatrist and drug counselor
confronted me for being high
I stood up in melodrama footlights
to produce a small urn of my mother’s ashes
that stunned them both
and I escaped up Long Beach Blvd.
through the streets of Ice Cube’s Compton
with her ashes as my only
protection–
not from anyone else
but myself.

Kevin Ridgeway was raised in Whittier, CA.  A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, recent work of his has appeared in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, The American Journal of Poetry, Main Street Rag, Verdad, Misfit Magazine, Up the River, Plainsongs, Lummox, The Cape Rock and So it Goes:  The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.  His latest books are A Ludicrous Split (with poems by Gabriel Ricard, Alien Buddha Press) and Smile Until You’re Alive Enough to Be Dead (Analog Submission Press, United Kingdom).  He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.