Chicago I sang to you until my voice drifted up
and crammed into the crevices of the Krainik’s ornate ceiling,
and I can’t get it down. Chicago your eyes look like you think too much.
Chicago will you pay my rent? Otherwise go sink into the lake.
Your furious pigeons fly like torn box kites.
Chicago when will you unroot yourself
from your concrete foundations and fly
across America’s graveyards?
When will you be worthy of your Addams and Monroes?
Of your artists subsisting on 312 and potatoes?
Chicago why is the Harold Washington Library red as a ghost’s insides?
Chicago you’re stuttering under the weight of the animal souls
you’ve transformed into ghostcolored air.
Chicago after all it is you and I tell heaven what is holy.
The cardboard boxes in your warehouses cry out in agony.
Melrose Park made me want to be a Boddhisatva.
What is the point of your madness?
Chicago I can’t quit you.
Chicago the ginkgo leaves are rallying on the sidewalk.
I haven’t read the Tribune in months, everyday another murder, citizens, murder.
Chicago I ate pizza across from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
When I go to Chinatown they lock me in Ping Park.
My friends and I push each other into the river crossing the railway bridge,
or jump to dodge the trains, or other times climb up and start a new life in that little house.
Chicago I punched a hole through the door after reading Sinclair.
My mind is made up there’s going to be fisticuffs.
Chicago I’m a union carpenter’s daughter.
My alcoholic mother thinks I’m disgraceful.
I won’t repeat Sandburg’s poems.
I smoked hookah on my friend’s Logan Square porch until she moved to the Middle East.
I sit in my apartment and stare out the window at a brick wall.
Chicago when will you unroot yourself
from your concrete foundations and fly
across America’s graveyards?
Chicago why is the Harold Washington Library red as a ghost’s insides?
Chicago you’re stuttering.
I can still hear them lowing.
I can still hear them lowing, citizens, they look at the ground with their miraculous eyes.
I’m a disgrace at good vodka introductions, spilling everything, citizens, and jumping off bridges.
I won’t repeat Sandburg’s poems to cats who spit at that man.
Chicago you look fat in those jeans.
Everyone in this city has money but me.
It occurs to me that I am Chicago.
Am I talking to myself again?
I’d better consider my natural resources.
My resources consist of two bottles of GNC vitamins six ex-boyfriends three ex-girfriends
an unpublishable manuscript lamenting/celebrating you
and the dent in the wall where I keep banging my head, citizens, against my, citizens, head.
The empty tea cups accumulate on my desk for weeks.
I have freed the penguins from the Lincoln Park Zoo, the sea lion at the Shedd is next.
Chicago when I was nine daddy took me to a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute
we wouldn’t have gone except somebody’d bought him the tickets
the paintings were colored with angelic light and I had no idea
how much my father liked art, my father who came home at night
smelling like sawdust and beer but who always kissed my forehead
and that was when I realized that art wasn’t something above me
that my father and beer liked art.
Am I talking to myself again?
Bike lanes are blowing kisses to the environment.
Community gardens are blowing kisses to the environment, citizens, blow.
The environment catches one the kisses, citizens, squished in a fist and puts it in its pocket.
Chicago what did we fight for in Haymarket Square?
Chicago the old gangster movies told me the truth.
Chicago are you even paying attention?
I’ll lay it out for you.
It’s true I don’t want to get a PhD or push the same button all day in an argicultural
supply factory, I’m impulsive and explosive anyway.
Chicago I’m putting my queer shoulder against yours.