The Road Not Taken

is similar to the ice cream not taken,
except the ice cream melts
and the road doesn’t. I mean, the road
gets hot too. Just like the hot chocolate
not taken. Except the hot chocolate not

taken gets cold. And the ice cream doesn’t
and the road doesn’t, usually. See, the best way,
I guess, to tell the difference between a road
and ice cream is the temperature. It’s the same
with hot chocolate. Hot chocolate’s heat

is so important that they put it in the title.
You never hear ice cream called ‘cold ice cream,’
and you never hear ‘hot road’ or ‘cold road’
or ‘average temperature road,’ because we know
it’s going to be an average temperature, mostly,

although sometimes a road can surprise you.
But the main point is that the road not taken
and the toothbrush not taken and the beard-
trimmer not taken and the pencil not taken
and the Monopoly game not taken all have

one thing in common. They’re all nouns.
And, come to think of it, they’re also not taken.
So it’s pretty cool that they’re related in that way.
I think the road is the pencil’s cousin and the beard-
trimmer is the aunt of hot chocolate, but there’s

a lot of divorce with nouns, so I’m not really sure.

i carry your heart with me (by george mihalka)

i carry your heart with me (i don’t carry it
literally) because that would be gross(creepy
like how thispoemlooks;onthepage
                              i fear
you fear me(maybe because i sometimes actually
do carry other hearts(with me) but they’re chicken
hearts, not human hearts, so just calm down

there’s nothing strange about that;justlike
there’s nothing strange about thissentence)

Ron Riekki’s books include U.P. (Ghost Road Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited And Here (MSU Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book). Right now he's listening to NPR's Fresh Air, not at work.