JON RICCIO, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Deliverance as Anchor

Dad’s game Honor the Oncologist splinters
second opinions from their door. His immune
system dictates no outing to the nature center

where they display worldwide Xmas trees,
a coatroom for each continent, Italy’s fragile
magi bearing moss around a manger.

At the arboretum’s gift shop, I buy deciduous
trivets for a sister who sees Deliverance
as Ronny Cox’s most cordial moment.

We DVR Godfather II the night she asks
Alexa to unpack our name which means
hedgehog or curly haired. I thank

my horsebacks National Velvet doesn’t
play until I leave for fussy Mississippi.
Maybe I want to live in a humidor.

Maybe Dad’s aversion to urostomy
is the reason his waistline’s purged,
but this morning he guzzled milk

above the dishwasher whose door
moves like an yttrium caribou
reflecting foil that mummifies

a fritzed burner. Burt Reynolds
dodged a murder charge,
so declares the periodical

atop hedgehogged medical supplies.
Ronny Cox, as a James Dickey
protagonist you are an easy shoe.

Four years older than my father—
prognosis underwritten by rapids,
banjo as the rope snaps.

The earliest version of “Deliverance as Anchor” was written on 12/28/18, when I was attempting a poem every day after joining a group of writers who did the same. Poets Matthew Schmidt, Chad Foret, and Jillian Etheridge received the stanzaless “I Cite Deliverance But Dad Still Has Bladder Cancer.” Reopening the email, my eyes land on lines I eventually excised: “Slavic dragons / a Polish yule.” The day before, everyone in my family, except for Dad who was immunosuppressed, went to Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan, touring their annual Worldwide Christmas Trees exhibit, my Italian-Polish heritage personified via made-over deciduous. December I fasten to worry: MFA/PhD applications, and previously, graduate music school preparation. Slide back a year, and it’s sadness over an orchestra audition (New York String Seminar at Carnegie Hall) that came nowhere close to passing symphonic muster. These pale when your father is in life-or-death circumstances and the surgery that hopefully eradicates his cancer leaves him without a bladder, urethra, or prostate gland.

Pine baubles do not a panacea make, but I was at a point in my writing where daily activities channeled themselves into poems, magi a strophe’s saving graces. Whether pressing send in a North Carolina airport or from a Portland hotel (where else to write about Tonya Harding, testing out the phrase “despite // assumptions from the world’s / Kerriganites”), those writer friends ‘heard’ me beginning on the shortest day of the year and ending early September, as comprehensive exams studying went from precedence to its own meal. Corn Chex, almond milk, and Ralph Neal never made it out of Martins Ferry, or everything I needed to know about James Wright’s “The Flying Eagles of Troop 62,” please pass the Ohio.

Deliverance is no It’s a Wonderful Life. Burt Reynolds is no George Bailey (Clarence would’ve probably mucked up the speedometers of Cannonball Run) but it’s what Turner Classic Movies was playing that post-needle evening our family made time for a television with taped-on snowmen. Who knew how we’d next gather, and under what circumstances? When Dad’s feeling well enough to watch a Georgia weekend go banjo-shatteringly wrong, you get your James Dickey-familiarized self into a quilt and paddle the genes.  

Dad’s in remission when the poem is workshopped as “Ted Turner Classics” on 1/29/20 (Outlook, the miracle rememberer of dates) at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Professor Angela Ball themed that class around cinematic ekphrasis. We watched Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions as a way of introducing revisions where we ‘obstructed’ each other by giving colleagues guidelines followed as closely or loosely as they like (example: I am the lead obstructor for Poet B, so I tell them to rewrite their prose block as a villanelle; Poet C asks me to dial a poem’s Steel Magnolias references from an 11 to 13, but leave Julia Roberts out of it).

“Disease with Turner Classic Movies as Anchor” attends a Zoom conference session with The Frost Place’s director, Patrick Donnelly (8/7/20, though it’s sent to him on the third), some older phrases, such as “cement caribou,” vying for simile spotlight. I replaced cement with yttrium, tightened a few lines, and renamed it “Deliverance as Anchor” last May. I revise on my stomach (draft, sitting down), usually in T-shirts, their logos molassesed to whatever floor is available. In the case of “DaA,” it was an apartment living room with a recliner whose occupants swear is the best vertebrae experience in the Deep South. The little bendy lamp that helped me see the keyboard is bronze-toned, thinking it’s gold. Gold that would serve as star shading for a magazine ad featuring one-hit wonder albums soon-to-drop. The one by which I now type is the color of a soldier’s pantleg, if the army were K·B Toys. 

A prompt I gave my students at the University of West Alabama last spring was “Write an elegy that incorporates the meaning of your last name. If your last name is without a definition, provide one. Include at least one transformation and a new word for tears.” Riccio does, in fact, “[mean] / hedgehog or curly haired.” I’ve been self-barbering since the pandemic, letting the tufts have nine- to eleven-month residencies. Last July, I trial-and-errored a quasi-Caesar, somewhat presciently since 2022 is intent on a 90’s revival. Now there’s a decade that tested Burt Reynolds. Thank you, Charles, for this opportunity and your thoughtful stewardship of the Ocean State Review. Your writing and friendship are, likewise, anchors.

Jon Riccio is the author of two chapbooks, Prodigal Cocktail Umbrella and Eye, Romanov, and the forthcoming full-length collection, Agoreography.