Poetry By Rick Christiansen

David Antis CC




Stuffed Monkey 

Anchorage, 1962—snow in the gutters,
porch light flickering like a bad tooth.
Mother hands me a stuffed chimp, plastic face,
painted grin wide enough to hold my name.
I call him Fleabee.

He is the one thing that stays.
Through the evictions, the carport lockers
where winter folds itself into cardboard boxes,
where even memory turns to frost.
I hold him at night like a prayer,
like the last warm thing in a house
growing colder.

At eighteen, I hang him from the ceiling—​
a belt for a noose, a joke no one laughs at.
Call it growing up. Call it survival.
But I do not take him down.

At twenty, his body splits, stuffing spilling
like something gutted. I put him in the dumpster
& walk away without looking back.

But I feel him still--
stitched into the hollow of my chest,
his small voice pressed into the silence,
saying stay, saying this is how you keep going.





Salvage

At thirteen, I learned
you could smile like danger
and Catholic school girls
might take you home.

At fourteen
I could make a girl feel
like I needed saving—​
just long enough
to learn the rhythm of her house.

Her dad worked late.
I’d be back the next week,
window cracked,
liquor gone,
cartons of smokes
under my coat.

Premium beef
was a good haul—​
wrapped tight,
no serial number,
no middleman needed.

I once emptied a whole chest freezer,
two black garbage bags
dragged like bodies
through a back alley.
Four hundred bucks
in under an hour.

You move meat,
you make cash.
You move a stereo,
you get a file number
and a court date.

Never take the TV.
Too many questions.
You steal perishables—​
beef, booze—​
shit that vanishes
before anyone notices.
No one files a report
on a missing steak.

I learned to move
before the ice melted,
before someone checked the freezer.

We called it salvage—​
what we took. 
Like we were divers. 
Pulling gold from a wreck.
Clawing through a carcass
no one bothered to bury.

Stripping the fat from people
too stuffed to notice the loss.

We said it with a grin, 
like irony was a knife 
we kept tucked in a back pocket.




Rick Christiansen is the author of Bone Fragments (2024) and Not a Hero (2025). His work has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and he was a finalist for the RHINO Poetry 2025 Founders Prize. He has also been longlisted for a 2025 Rhysling Award (outcome pending). His poems explore survival, memory, class, and the residue of violence. He lives in Kansas City.


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