Son of the Late Bloomer Bandit
The cops raided our house
and my parents were both taken
to jail. I had no choice but to
identify my father
in surveillance videos.
I was subpoenaed
by the district attorney.
I sat in the echoing marble halls
of the courthouse
across from the young bank tellers
he terrorized, both of them girls
my age who glared at me
when they recognized
his sinister face in mine.
My testimony helped
send my father to prison
for the rest of his life.
It’s been ten years
and now my mother
is dead and no longer held
captive in the epic misery,
of his fiendish lifelong search
for a chemical escape.
He said heroin made him
closer and unafraid of death,
numb to his own doom.
They announced his
life sentence on the front page
of the local newspaper, my
name was never mentioned.
They did not want to believe
he had a son who
was more dangerous
to them with deep wounds
gone unhealed. I will kidnap
their fathers if I ever decide
to return to claim
what they all robbed
from me. I will be
reunited with
my father in prison,
where we will start
a massive riot to burn
the walls down, He
and I will escape from
the smoking rubble
back into a world
where people tried
to throw us all away.
About the Author: Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press). Recent work has appeared in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly, Gasconade Review, The American Journal of Poetry and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, among others. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.
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Image Credit: Charles Street Jail Complex, Jail, 215 Charles Street, Boston, Suffolk County, MA. The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 