Short Order Minds. By Kevin Ridgeway

we cough from the secondhand 

smoke in all the truck stop gravel 

voices, a side of french fries to 

nurse our premature 3 AM hangover 

on the drive home from that party 

in Pico Rivera where we waited 

a drunken eternity for our friend 

Shaggy’s reggae band after they 

got too stoned to remember what

they learned during what must have 

been an unmemorable rehearsal,

welcoming the clarity inside the 

fresh brewed coffee of our greasy 

spoon after party attended by 

midnight roadside strangers who 

had nowhere to go other than 

the Ralph's supermarket

whose meat section

of pig snouts and chicken feet

we pretended to browse and

be the lookout while our 

brand new tall Amazonian blonde 

friends stuffed wine jugs down 

their pants, all of us cooling down

from the heat of our vices fortified 

by an early breakfast or late dinner 

we neglected in the turn-on ogle of

a busy waitress running back and

forth long enough to not realize

her slip was teasing me from 

the short skirt behind her apron, 

and Rickie Lee Jones sang down 

and out music to accompany the 

realization that we didn’t have 

a solitary dime to cover our bill 

right before the night manager 

served all of us a complimentary

pair of black eyes for dessert.  

KEVIN RIDGEWAY lives and writes in Long Beach, CA. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock, Spillway, Up the River, Suisun Valley Review, KYSO Flash, Home Planet News, Cultural Weekly, Big Hammer, Misfit Magazineand So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He is the author of six chapbooks of poetry. His latest book, A Ludicrous Split, a collaboration with fellow poet Gabriel Ricard, is now available from Alien Buddha Press.