“Hazing investigation into Mt. Ararat hockey team found pattern of ‘sexually inappropriate conduct’”
—Portland Press Herald, April 29, 2025
“Onondaga DA to Westhill Lax Players Involved in Alleged Hazing: Turn Yourself In”
—Finger Lakes Daily News, April 30, 2025
If you ask how long the effects of hazing lasts,
it’s till the end of poems. No, longer. As long
as the sleep of death. It’s the length of a billion
leaves. It’s the memory of dark in the middle
of your noon. It’s fear ingrained in your home.
It’s moon in your chest. It’s Macbeth debted
in the desks of my amygdala. It’s absence of
absence when you just want peace. It’s shaking
all night like an earthquake’s in your skin. It’s
stronger. Sin. A hazmat at the door. It’s a core
of pure Hell. I know. I was there, enlisted,
military, duct-taped mouths, ensuring futures
of gloom in your best days. It’s essays I write
in the nightmares of night where I replay all
the replays of the fence and the ice in our eyes
when they gathered like witches, no, much
worse, more male, and more morbid, murmurs
of curse words and curses of teens carrying
canteens with jock-minds and abusive dads
recreating wrecks that had us calling suicide
hotlines for years with the gore of agoraphobia
from the memories of fence, but the problem
of your problem is forgetting our resilience,
all of those who have been hazed and are
battling the battles of the past—all the bullies
of the world can kiss my goddamn ass. No!
On second thought, don’t touch us. Just get
help, because you know what you did, and
who died—just one when I was in, one who
never got out; and I was more afraid of our
side than the enemy, but now that I’m free,
I turn to poets and poetry, which the bullies
don’t read. But the resilient do. And if you
were hazed, all poems are for you. And this
world’s for you. We inherit the earth by voice.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.
