Front Porch Review
A literary magazine for the young at heart and mind

Passing the faded and graffiti painted
neighborhood watch signs
at the corners of a barrio,
the neighborhood I grew up in
the only white boy for several blocks
the day is dimming into night
here in this cul-de-sac that
was once a large swath of ranch land
where my great-grandfather
rode in his sputtering
and bruised delivery truck
into the black and white rising sun
to the main veins of Los Angeles
delivering blocks of ice

He’s dead now,
and after my great-grandmother died
my mother and I stole his old tombstone
and put it in our backyard garden
growing in an abandoned outdoor
sauna filled with thousands
of pounds of potting soil
that was constructed
all those years ago

I run into George on my night walk
─ George was my great-grandfather’s best friend
George told me I had the beard and hair of an
“unemployable mountain man”
but I had a nice-looking girl,
he saw her watering our lawn
I told him it was good to see him,
and he told me,
“Oh, I live here.
I’ll die here.
You know that.”

I made a beeline for the bush
and shrub seclusion on my
crooked sidewalk
path to my shady bungalow,
and George moaned forth
“I’m here always.
you know that.”

over George’s slumped phantom shoulder
his arm sockets forever gnarled
by the rigors of octogenarian living
was a spirit vision of my great-grandfather
with two foamy haired Irish-American
bloat muscle armfuls of ice blocks,
winking at me with a supernatural sparkle
in the decaying orange baths of
the growing darkness while the
ghetto birds fly across the edges of
our rooftops with extraterrestrial spotlights.

By Kevin Ridgeway

Kevin Ridgeway is a writer from Southern California. Mr. Ridgeway has worked many dead-end jobs but has spent the past year devoting his life to being a starving scribe. He wasn't made for these times and should have lived over a century ago. He dreams in black and white and collects old rhythm and blues records, which provide the soundtrack to his life. Mr. Ridgeway has been a creative type since birth, and with encouragement from older folk, has bushwhacked through life trying to find his artistic voice, which is best represented in poetry and prose. His work has appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications in the past year. He currently lives in a shady bungalow cat in a suburb of Los Angeles with his girlfriend and their one-eyed cat. His e-mail address: kevinridgeway82@gmail.com