Chicago in the Summer
by Moe Lowe
I. is good.
You sign the lease, you change your pace, you change perspectives in the literal sense.
Who knew that the other side of the city had so much to say?
You notice everything, everything is new. Signs that say, beware of the dog. Signs that say, if you’re looking for a sign
II. keep looking.
If you’re still shaken up about 9/11, the Chicago Air and Water Show says, too freakin’ bad.
Lizzo is capital g Good. A summer that is gushing.
You recognize nothing.
III. Hospitals aren’t any colder in the summer
even when your jugular is capital j Cut.
This feels like soggy pizza. Chicago, you’ll never be New York.
Chicago, you’ll never be my home.
Pizza with no intention, but what’s pepperoni got to do with it.
IV. Actually quite a bit.
Meat lures us in room 3328. Pepperoni, that equals hope.
This is a football movie – exact same amount of yelling.
Her dad’s mouth doubles as a locomotive.
The nurses could never.
V. He’s a working man.
Summer gives him olive skin. He doesn’t shave because he doesn’t have a reason. Thighs like elephants, bowlegged like my brain.
Humidity doesn’t beg for Put Togetherness, but neither do funerals, and she’s not dead, so we grab our glue sticks.
Five o’clock shadow that says, I work at a railway station and I have two daughters
VI. one of which almost died.
Bloodshed is often followed by a sense of false consciousness.
Chicago saved her because it was too tired to push her arms down and fuck. So Chicago tosses the flag, says, hold your roll boys we’ve got a live one.
The city that holds a knife to a woman with a halfway decent rack at the corner of 3 a.m. and Halsted.
Chicago in the summer is
VII. something my uncle told me once.
You haven’t made me this mad since the Cubs won the pennant. In a crowd of millions, to breathe
VIII. it requires precision.
Celery salt that tastes like tobacco and comfort.
Fuck your canker sores.
A city that whispers an apology – I guess I just expected the lamp posts to step in by now.
A city that begs for forgiveness, the ignorant concrete just under us all.
A city that winks then makes you sleep with him.
A city that’s so much more manageable than New York. A city that gives a boy’s daughter ten seconds to live and the same amount of time to shotgun an Old Style.
Chicago goes gray then gray again, the city of the safe cigarette.
Chicago in his laundry t-shirt. Chicago with its white teeth.
When a beautiful woman dies,
Edgar Allen Poe does a full black flip in Purgatory, and the woman just bleeds out.
