April 8, 2016
Kevin Ridgeway


​I dialed the same phone number
listed in the white pages when 
I was a kid, the same one that
I used as an adult and needed 
to get bailed out of my usual 
cross country trouble.  We had 
just emptied the house and 
put it on the market, but she 
still answered in that same old 
teaser of an answering machine 
message, sorry we're not here 
but leave your name, number 
and we'll get back to you, okay?  
The first time I'd heard her 
voice since she died.  

I whispered her a happy birthday
and began the rest of a life filled
by her echoes against the walls 
of my mind as it listens to her
endless silence.



Cheeseburger Pinup
Kevin Ridgeway


​​she stood there clutching a sandwich 
from the health food portion of a popular 
fast food joint wearing nothing but glorified
underwear and a beauty queen crown,
ketchup marking her lipstick and nearly
bare breasts that convinced me to purchase
three veggie burgers that my body was
unable to digest with the hope that I could
win a date with this woman I had never met,
whose life size image stood half naked beside 
the ketchup dispenser, tempting lonely men 
who dined in the shadows of the Kidz Zone 
playground, one of which stole her from 
the restaurant before the contest was over 
so he could date her forever, but she was 
returned from her captivity with her arms
duct taped into place, and we kept up with
our super sized daydreams of her while she
smiled faintly at all of us underneath dreary
fluorescent lights showing us dining in the
closing time darkness of the suburbia we
all escaped from with her pasties made of
two all beef patties, melting us into her
own demented recipe of special sauce.

About the Author: Kevin Ridgeway lives and writes in Southern California. A two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, his work has most recently appeared in the pages of Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Spillway, BIG HAMMER, Cultural Weekly, Lummox, RCC Muse, Dryland Lit and The Mas Tequila Review, among others. He is the author of six chapbooks of poetry, including On the Burning Shore (2014, Arroyo Seco Press) and Contents Under Pressure (2015, Crisis Chronicles Press).

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