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Pizza and Steakhouse Stars
The summer before I was a pinwheel pattern with four arms fresh out the Milky Way. I was washing dishes in a tiny ass backroom with the Keo bum Walt Whitman look-alike. Greek thin pizza crusts, ribeye fats, ketchup-covered fries. Scraping, rinsing oval plates with scorching hot water with a wall-mounted pull-down kitchen faucet. We were shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh. He didn’t speak. The universe is still expanding outward, even here. One night and past 10 p.m. orders still coming in-Jesus christ, goddammit, sonofabitch, it’s hotter than a peach orchard boar. He nodded. I scraped, rinsed. He washed dried stacked. Smoke break outside together looking up. “Every star you see has at least one planet,” I explained. He nodded. Then a big puff and sigh. Keo bum dropped the t. “I went to prison for my brother- not for him but for mother. He’d have been killed. I don’t hurt kids.” Deep shaky low voice guttural truth there, goosebumps. Like a stray dog, I took him in. “When I grow up, I’m moving to the neighboring galaxy,” I said. “It’s called Andromeda.”
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This poem is from the chapbook Folk Tales and Elegies: a magical memoir in verse by Sal Ragen (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/folk-tales-and-elegies-a-magical-memoir-in-verse-by-sal-ragen/
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FOLK TALES AND ELEGIES include #poems of #magical realism/ ruralism and memoir. The poems are a look into the writer’s life growing up in the #Midwest as a #neurodivergent person. From giant magical catfish, to a pizza place split between the cosmos and her journey as a two-world walker—This chapbook is a memorial to the people and places that helped shape her as a writer.
Sal Ragen is a writer from Iowa. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in Dogwood Journal of Poetry and Prose, Allegory Ridge: Aurora, River Heron Review, Pine Row Press, Spectrum, Red Coyote, The MacGuffin and The McNeese Review.
The Paddock Review 