Category: Chicago
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First snow
A tiny, frozen splash alights under my left eye. What is falling at 6:05 a.m., here, in the dark? Black sky speckled with street lights and white clumps, fumbling onto my face and jacket. I heave in to feel the cold rush enter my nostrils, then throat and chest. It cleanses with a shiver. I…
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Trying to make out the words carved into an old garden wall dug up in my backyard
The river no longer passes here regardless how I ask, I am left to find my journey in this dark soil. Or The river no longer passes here regardless how I pray for it to return — I ache for its filthy banks. Or The river did not announce it would no longer pass here…
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The city breathes
We walk in a world muffled with blue-white snow piled high. A single shadowy path guides us. Our boots crunch, blunted echoes in the distance — a car horn, shovel, train crossing, dog bark — the light of smudged stars tap through a black, hazy sky, asking permission to appear and speak. The city takes…
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City river
How its surface hides the undulation on its bottom; how its edges spill over and are spilled over into. How as it is fed by another, the water tumbles, turns over broken concrete slabs; how herons perch there, oblivious. How when the tunnel overflows with rain, it releases a stench into the summer breeze that…
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Francisco stop
Francisco stop Cool, damp dawn air, soft thuds of platform planks, long row of barely kept garages, the alley easement, weedy vines finding life on the chain-linked fences running along the tracks and the wooden gates of tiny yards. The city has its own nature, breathing as it does in these quiet between times. A…
Poems from in between 