Erin Matheson Ritchie
Erin Matheson Ritchie is a queer, chronically ill educator living in California with her pet rabbit. Her poems appear in New Feathers Anthology, Naugatuck River Review and Oracle: A Fine Arts Review.
Easy read of the poems in the images above:
After the Butchering
CW: hospitals, internal bleeding, animal death
It takes my doctor three days to diagnose
internal bleeding, no outward signs to discern my fate.
But what of the sparrow beating wings
against window till its neck crunches and stills
in the shade of my dusty porch?
Your nose nestling against my throat, burrowing
past breathy promises, pulling away only
when I pull you in.
A swollen, violet bruise blooming springtime across my hips,
sickly green trickling down my thighs, a gruesome
scarlet letter branding me broken without breaking skin.
Displaced blood must collect somewhere, the lowest point,
the weakest flesh. I cannot walk without screaming.
Mt. Bachelor
alt text note: bullet points appear as check boxes in the image above
Check the box if your medical history has changed:
I tick no boxes, but what of my chipped knees, my skinned tooth? Remnants of a late summer ride, always following your line down the mountain, thick tire tracks and impossible speeds
But I never pedal fast enough to catch up, never trust a berm to reel me in, always picture falling as I careen into a faithless collision of my own praying.
Sprawled on packed dirt and lava rock, I imagine your brakes squeaking protest as you discover my absence, whip your bike around, pedal uphill to hoist me up, a tender try again to coax me back onto the saddle seat
Yet trail etiquette dictates a one-way thoroughfare so downhill beckons and you bomb to meet it, leaving me to stumble upright, wrestle an aluminum frame into compliance, and pick an unsteady line sloping ever downward into a reluctant twilight.
An Inheritance
(after Noor Unnahar)
my mother // freckles, fear, stick-straight hair.
my father // a ski jump nose, a hair trigger temper, a yearning for the divine.
my aunt // unfinished manuscripts, bermuda shorts, carabiner clipped to the right.
my sister // wanderlust, wonderment, playlist titles wider than the interstate.
my grandfather // peanut butter raisin oatmeal, slivered almonds in every spoon, Mahler’s 5th.
my brother by blood // a hunger for knowledge, a love for lore, an arsenal of lightsabers.
my brother by choice // side-splitting laughter, soul-knitting songs, heart-mending gratitude.
