Andrew Riutta

A Door Open to Private Ceremony

My father just told me, while he was shooting up insulin and swallowing his bedtime pills, that years ago, a fellow medicine man said he’d seen—amid the sweat lodge the two were in—the face of an old Vietnamese woman right above Dad’s left shoulder. And that she’d likely been the one who watched over him during the war. But even more, throughout his wild years. After he got back to the States … literally kept him from being scraped across gravel and tossed—by other teeth-kicking mules—into some cold, muddy ditch or brush pile between Newberry and McMillan. Or skinned while still breathing behind the Airport Bar and then sank to the bottom of a pond. (Or shackled himself and sent to Marquette Prison for a thousand years.) So, this is why, at all of the Ghost Suppers, my father offers a bamboo plate of fish and rice to the fire. 

floundering moth—
I gently land it
 in a moon shadow

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About the Author

Andrew Riutta was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His latest book, Blessed: Modern Haibun on Almost Every Despair (Red Moon Press, 2022) was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award and won the HSA Merit Book Award for best haibun collection. Currently, he lives in Gaylord and is a Catholic school custodian.

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