HOMECOMING

I asked 
my incarcerated 
father during 
a collect call from prison: 
where did they bring me 
home after I was born?
He told me they brought me
to a little puke green house
at the top of a hill. 
My mother would walk 
up and down the hill
when I was weeks overdue
in an effort to muscle me out
of my first favorite hiding place.  
When they extracted me,
kicking, screaming
and unjustly circumcised, 
they brought me up there,
to their little puke green house.
My Dad could only remember 
sad memories of a marriage 
in crisis when it had 
barely gotten started. 
When they brought me home, 
it was too much for my Dad,
who retreated back into
heroin and crime and prison, 
a ghost of a home broken, 
where a plaque always 
hung on the wall as 
a way to torture me 
with a painful old cliche—home is where the heart is.  

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press, 2022) and Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press, 2025). His work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Heavy Feather Review, San Pedro River Review and Trailer Park Quarterly, among others. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives and writes in Long Beach, California.