Manhattan School of Confidence
Manhattan School of Confidence
I was 17 years old and barely a
hundred pounds soaking in my
own cum, pacing up and down
5th Avenue, trying to get up the
courage to ask for a job application
from The Gap
a beautiful woman among the throngs
removed her dress and began to
march naked, cutting through the
thick crowd on the sidewalk like
a rapier, everyone moving aside
with complete astonishment while
her bare breasts and shaved
vagina headed straight for me
I didn’t know what to do
until she came to a stop,
her nipples making eye
contact with me. she looked
down from her heels and
simply said,
“get the fuck out of the
way!”
I moved aside, never
to know why that had to
be my first time with
a beautiful, naked woman
and I looked on while her
smooth and confident ass
was photographed by tourists
and I went home jobless,
confident The Gap would
have stripped me bare only
to find my teenaged lack of
everything before handing
my application back and
telling me to get the fuck
out of the way.
Kevin Ridgeway lives and writes in Long Beach, California. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, recent work of his has appeared or is forthcoming in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, The Cape Rock, Up the River, KYSO Flash, San Pedro River Review, Lummox, Misfit Magazine, Suisun Valley Review and Cultural Weekly, among others. He is the author of six chapbooks of poetry, including On the Burning Shore (Arroyo Seco Press, 2014) and Contents Under Pressure (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2015). His latest book is A Ludicrous Split (alongside poems by Gabriel Ricard, Alien Buddha Press, 2018).
