Snapshots of Last Year’s Chicago

by PHILIP JAMES STERERF

Sitting River Walk

Why is your boat
touring my side of the river?

The Freedom Center
is torn down,
the Cop Casino
is just rubble,
and The Spirit of Progress
is being renovated.

Brother, I’m addressing you.

Goose Island is featherless
and the roller-skates
don’t roam the building
full of echoing ghosts
of me singing silent praise 
to myself for sticking it out
in such a wasteland.

Why is your boat
touring my side of the river,
brother? 
The Piss Bridge 
is that way
and I’ll be nowhere still. 

Cook County Picnic Table

“No one follows the laws in the city,”
they say as I write 
in the woods
on a picnic table
full of kid snack wrappers
loose tobacco leaves
anarchy A’s and stupid swastikas
carved in a dead wood
among the live trees.

He sees nothing wrong 
in the woods
the community of crows
the rows and rows
of bark being bitten
by peckers
as he carves 
an S in the shared space
with a tool meant 
for art or survival,
same thing.

Same thing city woods
trees and concrete 
we, the pests, 
blame the space
and the people within it
as if we weren’t the same. 

Blue Line Nomad

Cigarette on the train
trying to get tickets
for a game that’s over.

The people leave and
she waits for me 
to answer any of the words
she’s saying to herself,
giving me the key
for a castle full of ghosts
that I don’t want to haunt. 

Her tattoos are Sharpie 
but forever. Infinite
wisdom in reverse.

We’re all going somewhere
but we’re never going back.
We’ve all done something
but we’ll never do it again
in the same air at the same
second at the same place
but I won’t stop her from trying. 

Why try? My words aren’t
backwards wax Zeppelin Stairway
and she doesn’t have another needle to spin.