When I Write of PTSD, My Best Friend, a Vietnamese Barber, Tells Me I Should Write about Sex Instead by Ron Riekki

And I think about opposites, about how I could never cut
hair, would cut myself, was what they call a ‘cutter,’
rubbing a paperclip over and over again against my calf
until the blood stood proud, and I think about the word
same, how it reminds me of Saame, or Saami, or Same,
depending on the spelling, how my ancestors lived in Finland,
but not inland, on the outskirts, on an island, where my great-
great-grandmother drowned, and I told my mother about
the drowning, in my research, and she told me about
a cousin who’d drowned last year and I didn’t even know.
How could I not know that? How could I live another year
with so little sex? And instead cling to so many memories
of my stupid late teenage years thrown away on war.



Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel and Posttraumatic: A Memoir, and edited Undocumented, The Many Lives of The Evil Dead, And Here, Here, and The Way North. He has books upcoming with Main Street Rag, Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, McFarland, and Wayne State University Press.