August 5, 2015 | The Lit Issue

Logan Center Family Saturday Festival: United We Drum AUG 22, 2015 / 12–5 pm Wrap up the 2014–15 Family Saturdays season with student drummers from Muntu Dance Theatre’s United We Drum summer percussion program, a performance by Funkadesi, art workshops, and more!

Festival admission: $5 single tickets, $20 for families of 5+ Purchase at tickets.uchicago.edu.

Onsite workshop registration is first come first served.

FREE PARKING available all weekend and Mon–Fri after 4 pm. Visit arts.uchicago.edu/logan/visit for more information.

LOGAN CENTER 915 E 60TH ST AT DREXEL AVE

773.702.ARTS

LoganCenterFamilySaturdays

sOuTh sidE wEEKlY The South Side Weekly is a nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. Started as a student paper at the University of Chicago, the South Side Weekly is now an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side, and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Executive Editor Managing Editor

Bess Cohen Jake Bittle

Contributing Editors

Maha Ahmed, Austin Brown, Sarah Claypoole, Mari Cohen, Bea Malsky, Hannah Nyhart, Robert Sorrell Emily Lipstein Andrew Koski Lexi Drexelius Alex Harrell, Sofia Wyetzner

Social Media Editor Web Editor Visuals Editor Layout Editors

Staff Illustrators: Julie Wu, Zelda Galewsky Business Manager

Harry Backlund

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 1212 E. 59th Street Ida Noyes Hall #030 Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

POETRY

jOnEs cOmmERcial, mY fiRsT jOb, and a whOlE nEw wORld OuTsidE Of

maYbE This is ThE summER

jack murphy…4 chicagO, PaRT 2

mari cohen…5 chicagO

jazz hOPs a RailcaR TO chicagO,

dusablE REmEmbERs his wifE, KiTTihawa

OdE TO bROThas & sisTas

amelia dmowska…20

dan “sully” sullivan…33

gOldfish

claude robert hill, iv…34

hannah shea…5

anna has a basil, shOOTing an innOcEnT

diane o’neill…7

blacK hashTags

ThE waY i sEE iT (mY sOuTh sidE)

mack julion…37

khaleelah d. muhammad…7

EssaYs

elaine hegwood bowen…17

shEl silvERsTEin

dmitry samarov…6

bROnzEvillE

dEvOTiOn

elbert tavon briggs…25

mike pocius…8

31sT sTREET bEach, liTTlE bROThER’s

ThE fORmaT has changEd

nicole bond…10

nEw TaTTOO, bRYn mawR

On summER

jack murphy…11 sElEcTEd ROOms

#10, #44

andrew lovdahl…21 PacE

vincente “subversive” perez…18

aerin cooper…29

bRaids

sElEcTEd ROOms

REflEcTiOn

dakota loesch…28

ficTiOn

o.a. fraser…36

languagE Of ThE unhEaRd

dEaR TEachER

EnglEwOOd

elaine hegwood bowen…16

#398:

ThE sTEElwORKER’s mERmaid

corey hall…23 gRandma’s ROOm

tony lindsay…26 whaT bEcOmEs Of ThE TRainEd

dane campbell…30 swEET, swEET daddY

sophie kennedy…35

paul dailing…12

mOmmY was a sTRiPPER maxwEll sTREET, a chicagO PORTRaiT, PORTRaYing a dREam

david nekimken…32

stephen english…14

cOnTRibuTORs…38 cROsswORd…39

Cover illustration by Lexi Drexelius.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Maybe This is the Summer

JACK MURPHY

vanessa valadez

Maybe this is the summer I rollerblade backwards the summer I ride my bike with no hands the summer I throw a curveball the summer I find those last six stars in Mario 64 Maybe this is the summer Maybe this is the summer I climb a tree the summer I learn dead man's float the summer we get a dog the summer a kid moves in next door Maybe this is the summer Maybe this is the summer Maybe this is the summer the pizza is plain cheese the summer Ken Griffey’s rookie card finds me the summer I ride the Giant

Maybe this is the summer I dump my arrowheads back into the pond Maybe this is the summer I buy all four railroads the summer I camp out on the roof the summer we go to Wisconsin Dells Maybe this is the summer I lose my retainer for good Maybe this is Maybe this is the summer I add my students on Facebook, the summer I don’t leave the dishes to rot in the sink the summer I return my mom’s texts Maybe this is the summer I read my book more than my phone the summer I don’t live my life through a screen the summer I finish watching The Wire Maybe this is the summer I keep it all together Maybe this is the summer that figures it all out Maybe this is the summer Maybe this is the summer Maybe this is the summer

Drop Maybe this is the summer a girl invites me to a party the summer I don't lie in truth or dare the summer I choose dare

that lasts Maybe this is the summer my mom gets me the haircut I want Maybe this is the summer Joey Ramone comes to my birthday

Maybe this is the summer my pet bird flies back Maybe this is the summer Maybe this is the summer the sleepover falls asleep before me the summer I don't spit the warhead into the sink hetay ummersay Iway earnlay igpay atinlay

Maybe this is the summer lawn mows itself Maybe this is the summer camp out on the roof

Maybe this is the summer the river in my backyard fills with water Maybe this is the summer Maybe this is the summer

I get my mom to love the simpsons i dont leave the dishes to rot in the sink the summer I dont grocery shop at 711

Maybe this is the summer I ride my bike down the sledding hill the summer the library returns all my books the summer the circus performs in my backyard

i rinse out my wine glass before the bottom is stained red I read my book more than my phone I finish my syllabus before september

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AUGUST 5, 2015

Maybe this is the summer of PG13 Maybe this is the summer I find a reason

Chicago HANNAH SHEA

A city is a whole despite itself as the whole of this poem breaks the page and the broken page holds the poem together A city cannot contain what its minds cannot contain and some minds are dark to themselves dimitry samarov

Chicago, Part 2 MARI COHEN

In a dream I rode every bus and train climbed into every color and number we know and circled the city for days.

And I nodded hello when people pushed open the firm CTA doors and a few people asked me the time but I mostly rode in silence listening for some rumble from outside and I circled the days of a city At 5 a.m., the South Side wrestling out of slumber so a mother can go clean up the beer bottles in Lincoln Park.

And each chord of time asked for a few people and in my silence I heard a teacher softly tell his students, no books yet And I heard the chatter outside The corner currency exchange And the beginning of the morning pull Of the financial district A swarm of people and suits spinning in firm revolving doors.

as this unlit street is dark to hide the dark and everything else keeps to its glowing windows Cities and poems read according to history— black type, white page white type, black page— Which way does it go?

A shoreline rind holding its bloated segments by the veiny pith a poem stuck between the teeth Walking bodies floating on shallow skin A city, a poem a person shrinking within leaving enough room to feel its shriveled edges Waves break against the shore swallowing the city whole Can you hear the page breaking?

And at night I dreamt Everyone in the city took out a pen And wrote to it I love you or why must you or next year, you must be or

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Shel Silverstein DMITRY SAMAROV

Everything’s wrong, Days are too long, Sunshine’s too hot, Wind is too strong.

Clouds are too fluffy, Grass is too green, Ground is too dusty, Sheets are too clean.

Stars are too twinkly, Moon is too high, Water’s too drippy, Sand is too dry.

Rocks are too heavy, Feathers too light, Kids are too noisy, Shoes are too tight.

Folks are too happy, Singin’ their songs.

Why can’t they see it?

Everything’s wrong!

L

ike all the best writers, Shel Silverstein could share complex ideas with simple words. He also knew how not to drone on or overstay his welcome. He didn’t waste time or space when he didn’t have to. This is one of the many reasons why his work continues to be loved by so many of us.

I was seven years old when my family moved to this country from the Soviet Union, so I didn’t grow up with Silverstein’s pictures and words. Those first few years I was just learning the language rather than enjoying its more nimble practitioners. The bedtime stories that were read to me were in Russian. Nevertheless, I was predisposed to appreciate Silverstein’s type of poetry because in the Soviet Union many of the best writers found their only means of expression through children’s literature. His wit, playfulness and melancholy were felt instantly familiar. As if I’d always known them.

Like Kharms, Marshak, and so many other writers both here and in the USSR, Silverstein never set out to write for children. He worked for Playboy and wrote raunchy songs for rock bands. He only turned to art and writing at all once it became clear he wouldn’t be in the starting lineup for his beloved White Sox. Though he did sell hotdogs at Comiskey for a time.

A couple months ago, in a bar on the North Side, I heard an essay read, offering yet another interpretation of The Giving Tree.

I’d be willing to wager that the number of interpretations of that book now outnumber its total word-count. That’s as telling a tribute to Silverstein’s genius as any. His few precise words inspire thousands from his millions of readers.

He’s one of the ones who told us most eloquently what it’s like to be a person. To be unlike anyone else.

dimitry samarov

My skin is kind of sort of brownish Pinkish yellowish white.

My eyes are greyish blueish green, But I’m told they look orange in the night.

My hair is reddish blondish brown, But it’s silver when it’s wet.

And all the colors I am inside Have not been invented yet.

This poems quoted here are “Mr. Grumpledump’s Song” and “Colors” by Shel Silverstein.

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AUGUST 5, 2015

Language of the Unheard DIANE O’NEILL

Baltimore burns, White reporters smirk: “What would Martin Luther King say?”

Racism is dead, Obama is president. If my biracial son saw a cop, freaked, sprinted, surely his throat wouldn’t be smashed, his spinal cord snapped. Suppose he wore a hoodie, went for Skittles and tea. Surely no one would shoot him.

There but for the grace of…

White-like-me people tsk tsk, shake heads: “What about Black on Black crime?” “Why do they burn their neighborhoods down?” “Why don’t they--?”

Why do they say they?

“I’m not racist, I have Black friends.”

My uncle was a cop, shocked I voted for Harold Washington: “They” were taking over. Now Maya Angelou poetry sings by his bedside.

The Way I See It (My South Side) KHALEELAH D. MUHAMMAD, J.D.

The South Side may not be the place where dreamers come to dream.

But here is where the players play, the hustlers flow and schemers learn to scheme.

Some say we’re over-crowded; there’s too much littering and blight; That you must be watchful at day, and bolt the doors at night; Don’t let anybody move in real close and hold your purses tight.

And you must never look directly at “beggars” or give them one thin dime.

They say neighbors aren’t neighborly, we simply haven’t got the time; That churches sit on every corner, each one collecting its due.

You turn it up, they shake you down, like the IRS taxing you.

julia mellen

If listening walls could speak they’d say children have no books.

The schools are struggling and kids can’t learn, with mean-muggers giving them looks.

The last thing they’d add in their summation is that teacher’s can’t really teach.

But I object because mine taught me that the world was within my reach.

My church gave me the presence of mind to endure life’s demanding test; And from the homeless, I was humbled to observe survival at its best.

My neighbors were quite kind to me so I’d say I was “South Side Blessed.”

It may be a bit overcrowded here, but our skies are open wide; To see our potential and that of her children, you have to come outside!

The resilient make their bones here and the Phoenix gets its wings.

Its ashes never swept away, they’re used for inspiring.

Their remains demand that others take flight, so they might have an aerial view, Then return to the nest, stand for peace; and at best, fight for justice too!

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Devotion MIKE POCIUS

I

was born and raised in Bridgeport: a dirty, industrial, polluted mess of a neighborhood. Located on the near-South Side of Chicago, under a scrambled mess of highway infrastructure, one will find ailing nineteenth century housing stock, a ravaged, beat-up business strip that’s still home to immigrants arriving from wherever, ready to stake their claim in this American life. These hardscrabble streets are not charmed, but are filled with hope. My mom lived and died there, and still I walk these streets.

My mom, Irene, grew up on the corner of 33rd and Racine on the South Side of Chicago. She lived and died on that same block. Her dad had a family grocery store on that corner. Mom and her sisters would help Grandpa maintain the store. The family just got by. Pops, my grandfather, having a “soft” heart, he gave away groceries on credit. The cash register was stuffed with more IOUs than green. The Gensiorski family barely got by themselves. As a mere baby (three years old), I recall the potbelly stove burning bright with coal and wood on a wintery afternoon and the smell of wet sawdust on the floor, with Grandpa chasing me about the store.

My Mom was certainly no wilting lily growing up in the city, and told me herself she picked up a smoking habit at fourteen. This was a rough and tough hardscrabble working class neighborhood, with saloons on every corner, the fragrant whiff of the union stockyards, and billowing factory smoke. When money was tight, with bill collectors at the front door, Grandma was selling homemade wine out the back door!

Mom was never afraid of hard work. In the 1940s she helped in the War effort; became a Rosie the Riveter working on B-29 bombers.

After the War romance blossomed for Mom. She met this wild guy Joe, a handyman electrician and car enthusiast–one of my aunts recalled, “Sparks started flying!” A famous family story about their courtship always raises eyebrows and laughs at family gatherings.

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

AUGUST 5, 2015

Soon after becoming a single parent, Mom’s biggest challenge arose.

Our father’s death sent brother Joe spiraling out into mental illness. My brother’s condition was so severe it literally sent him running out in the streets, ranting, talking to himself and hallucinating. Joe had no control over his behavior. He would keep Mom up all night and then harass her at work begging for cigs and drink. Many, many trips were spent taking Joe for stays at mental health hospitals. My Mom, even at death’s door, was more concerned about Joe’s wellbeing than her own.

O Irene Pocius (1922-2014)

One night Irene and Joe went out on a date. Mom stayed out all night.

Upon returning home in the dawning light, her enraged father was there to greet her and in his anger broke various windows and doors. Mom’s father kicked her out of the house for a week. Little did Mom’s dad know, but she spent the week with her girlfriend who lived right next door! Mom’s sisters would throw her fresh clothes across the gangway so she could be dressed for work.

Soon thereafter, Joe and Irene got married. Their deep love resulted in me being born. Twins Joe and Jan followed. Five years later, brother Allan made his appearance. Dad had a steady job as an electrical engineer in a stockyard warehouse. Money was good, so as the late fifties became the early sixties, our family was able to enjoy some spoils of the American dream; family trips out West, new, shiny, river barge-sized cars for Dad, new outfits for Easter Mass. Our home life was happy and loving, in a modest

courtesy of the author

and comfortable sort of way, but not perfect. Dad had a drinking problem that would sometimes disrupt our stable family life. Sometimes money would be tight, out would come Hamburger Helper and mac and cheese, and life would go on.

Then, in 1963, disaster struck.

The stockyards were shutting down, and suddenly Dad was without a job.

Shortly thereafter our father had a massive heart attack. He left us and we were swallowed in a cloud of darkness.

We were now a family in peril; our driving engine was gone. Our Dad meant everything to us and now we had nothing. Well, Mom didn’t wait around–she quickly got a factory job to support her young family, and being young rebellious teens, we worked hard to dismantle her efforts. We went the usual troubled youth route, running around all hours of the night, experimenting with drinking and drugs, questionable acquaintances, skirmishes with authorities, etc.– nothing really serious though.

ur house on Racine in Bridgeport was nicknamed “The Pit” for obvious reasons.

Our mother allowed it to be the meeting place for all the kids in the neighborhood. She also nurtured these street urchins with Banquet TV dinners and burnt frozen pizza. Over time our home developed a wellworn look with its broken furniture and leaky pipes. After wrecking the house, our motley bunch headed to “our” playground–of course, not a conventional one.

We had the luxury of a natural prairie running along the Bubbly Creek (Chicago River) and amid the industrial ruins. So literally one block away from our home lay fun, adventure, and danger. We not only played along the river’s edge, building dugout forts, catching bees and fireflies, staging mock wars; we even built a raft and paddled amid the turds and whitefish (condoms). We discovered wildlife in our prairie, strictly urban species; many rats the size of cats or small dogs and my favorite bird, the pigeon.

The prairie was always full of wonder.

It was not unusual to spy hastily built shacks sheltering the homeless and I remember hoboes fresh off the nearby railway cars, huddled around campfires heating their potluck stew.

We copped the vagrants’ style and for fun hopped moving boxcars and got chased by train dicks. The fun ended when I got caught, brought home and double ass-whipped.

After Mom retired in her sixties,

Huelguistas & Abuelitas

she ran a hotdog cart, again on 32nd and Racine. With working class moms and latchkey kids, Mom provided a quick meal, provided a necessary service to these hungry kids. In the cabinet she stashed pop for the kids and cold beer for herself.

When Mom was busy or distracted some enterprising kids would go for the beers. She would catch them, and reply, “Put them back, boys. The beers are for Grandma!”

About three years ago Mom broke her hip and her health began to decline. In spite of her ill health there was no question who ruled the roost– she was still able to boss us around, tell us how to run our lives, and yes, provide for sick brother Joe. Mom had severe heart and lung issues and in spite of her medical hardships never ever complained. It was amazing, unspoken, how we all came up to bat caring for Mom. I could not believe how difficult caregiving could be until I became a caregiver. All of us family members cared and nurtured her sometimes just with our presence to combat loneliness. With all my efforts

caring for Mom I still felt I couldn’t do enough; because she so completely cared, loved, and provided for us our entire lives. Motherhood.

A week before Mom left us we had an impromptu living wake. Magically friends and family filled the house to pay their respects. Mom, fading in and out, took in the loving group. Here in her honor, all took turns holding her hand, and spoke to her though she could no longer speak.

Tuesday, January 29, 2014, 10pm Nephew Ivan, Sister Jan and I held vigil over Mom in the TV’s glow.

Ivan tucked in Mom tight on her cozy recliner and we all took turns holding her hand and reassuring her with our love and devotion. Near midnight her breathing slowed. On this cold winter night we took in these last precious moments of her presence. In this darkest hour Mom left us.

Her hand still warm, Sister Jan kissed her forehead, and bid her goodbye. At 3am the dark-cloaked messengers from the funeral parlor stole Mom away, but they could not take her undying love.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

The Format has Changed NICOLE BOND

M

y neighborhood used to be 70’s top 40 with a splash mayor, the only mayor, who lived across the street from the of jazz. The streets once buzzed with haunting lawn they called home, liked them, so nobody messed with bohemian melodies. The spirit of progress was them. We all got the point. We all went to the Point. The its heartbeat. A mix of races, backgrounds, and incomes farthest point of land jutting out into the water accessed by comprised the lyrics. The college town energy made you feel peddling along the lakefront’s edge or by strolling across anything; everything was possible walking along the hubbub the bridge arched overhead the lake shore’s drive. of 53rd Street. Bestselling hardcover books stood proudly on It was alive. The thump thump doo doo doooo do… tables, upright, spines unbroken at Kroch’s and Brentano’s. thump thump doo doo doooo do! Chhh ta chhhchh ta The same books shelved together with lesser known chhhh ta chhhcha ta…. titles all with spines broken and pages turned frequently But the format has changed. My neighborhood is now lived a few blocks south up the street and down the stairs, on auto tunes. Pandora has opened her box. The big small where membershiped patrons sat for hours just reading, not town independent bank on the corner, once anchoring it drinking cappuccino or listening to music or talking on cell all, has fallen by the way of the other banks now merging phones…just reading. with another bank. Even my statements look different each Wise men played chess in Harper Square. month. Not just the balances they report but even the paper The grocery store was co-operative. they are printed on, now flimsier, lesser. The university once Organic frozen yogurt and fresh vegetables juiced in tiny lending its college town vibe has become a greedy monster black box storefronts decades before we knew what devouring all the land in its path. organic really was and long before yogurt froze on You do the math. Northshorians upside down in every corner or juices Jamba-ed. homes they couldn’t afford to begin with are flocking Africa had windows, artifacts, and artwork from to my 70’s top 40 with a splash of jazz village turning it the mainland for purchase or just for perusing. into a techno-synthesized diatribe with no soul.

Dr. Wax had tracks and tracks of vinyl.

Clarke’s used to be well-made shoes you There was a newspaper stand on the could buy in the mall on 55th Street. corner, and Big Jim’s smoke shop Now Clarke’s is a 24-hour diner under the viaduct, sold assorted with lousy food, lazy wait staff and hippy paraphernalia…rice leftover baked goods spinning on papers, hemp papers, papers a fluorescent-lit carousel that with a wire running through needs to be Swiffer-dusted. so fingers would not burn The record is scratched. when handmade cigarettes The parcel of land on were smoked to their absolute the southwest corner was a ends. I saw the train zipped parking lot except for the above the viaduct. It was the few weeks of the year when it way to really fly long before was a Christmas tree lot. The we called it Metra. music began changing when Yellow mellow crepes the lot became a Border’s served on Sunday morning books. I read my books at 57th with fresh-squeezed mimosas or Street and considered the new beef bourguignon on Friday nights neighbor an insulting passing with Kir Royales. Parakeets lived in fancy that wouldn’t last-an intro to the trees. Enormous green birds made the next song. I was right. their home hiding in the stellar regions But now, I’ve just thrown my hands of the park with the call and response of up, in helpless what-the-hell-ever-ness now thumy phan Coltrane tales. Sure they squawked relentlessly that the space has been replaced by made in China and chewed the electrical wires and peppered cars with their plastic shoes and plastic purses and plastic pants and plastic droppings… people selling them all. I don’t like the new song playing. It But the mayor – the real mayor, the best mayor, the Black has no beat, no melody, no lyric– just noise.

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AUGUST 5, 2015

Braids JACK MURPHY

T

he wind is blowing out front of the church. Mexican women are setting up makeshift flower tents. A sign on the door says, “Los Globos no son permitidos adentro de la iglesia.”

Beneath that, it reads, “No balloons allowed in the church.” In between, an uneven hand has scrawled “Class of 2014.” The swear word that came next has been scribbled out.

Little children—siblings of the graduates—are sitting on the steps, a bundle of stiff collars and patent leather and polka dots. The air is warm. It’s morning.

There are three of them on the steps. Sitting highest is the boy, six, playing a racing game on his phone. The older sister, eleven, is braiding the hair of her younger sister. The tiny girl is maybe three, sitting on the lowest step, talking expressively without making any sense.

“These clouds are liars,” she says in her little kid voice, and a few adults nearby glance up to see.

Every few minutes, applause bursts out from the open church doors behind the children. Day-old sidewalk chalk fades at their feet. An ice cream truck rolls by struggling to squeeze through the lines of cars parked along the street. The children ignore it.

Sitting upright, the older sister periodically unwinds the braids she’s finished, runs her hands through her sister’s hair, straightens it, holds it up, lets the wind blow through and lift it.

“My hair is like a kite!” the little girl says.

The boy loses his game, groans a little, looks up at the sky in frustration, shakes his head, begins again. He’s wearing a pin on his shirt that says “I did it!” in metallic turquoise glitter. His clip-on tie is perfect; his pants are at least four inches too short.

A graying white couple walks up. The man is dressed in khakis and a blazer with shining brass buttons. The woman wears big blue pearls around her neck. Beads of sweat form at his temples; makeup congeals on her face. They’re late.

“You kids know if this is the graduation?” he asks.

“Is the graduation in here or what?”

The younger sister in polka dots stops talking to herself and, looks up at him. She points down the street. Her older sister nods. The boy is immersed in his game.

“Well thank you, little lady,” he smiles, and the two walk off away from the church toward a bowling alley in the distance.

The big sister returns to her little sister’s hair.

She braids and unbraids, runs her hands through, lets the wind blow, begins again. zelda galewsky

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

#398: The Steelworker’s Mermaid PAUL DAILING

O

n Lake Michigan, at 41st Street Beach, a mermaid suns herself by the water.

Carved in stone, she stretches, her arms thrown back, her hair trickling out in rivulets from a peaceful, strong face. On top of a limestone boulder that once separated lake from land, the mermaid acts as resting spot for weary joggers, an object of curiosity for beach-bound children.

For fourteen years, no one knew where she came from: from 1986 to 2000, it was a secret thing hidden at Burnham Park, north of 39th. Only locals knew it.

It was a meeting place by the water for families, lovers and smokers.

Rumors swirled about some long-forgotten 1800s mansion, torn down and tossed as landfill in the lake; a part of Columbian Exhibition artwork cast into the water; or a lovelorn sculptor working alone by the moonlight reflected off the lake.

No one guessed that it was a laid-off steelworker and a couple friends who gave the city La Sirena.

Roman

“They just closed the damn door,” Roman Villareal said as his great-grandchildren laugh through his studio at 100th and Ewing.

The studio is filled with gasping, glowing, colorful paintings and sculptures by Roman and other artists, mostly Latino, seeking to tell the story of South Chicago.

Under the Bridge, the studio’s called. The Chicago Skyway snakes overhead.

“One shift went out, the next shift was coming. And everyone who was coming in, they wouldn’t let you in, not even to get your stuff out of your box or nothing. They slammed the lock on there,” Roman said. “That was the last time the men went into the steel mill.”

Between 1979 and 1986, about 16,000 Chicago-area steelworkers lost their jobs. Roman Villareal was one of them.

The steel mills that helped build the nation were out-priced by foreign markets: Wisconsin Steel, U.S. Steel, Acme, Republic, South Works, Iroquois Steel, General Mills, Valley Mould & Iron, LTV and others closed, one after another, all along the South Side of Chicago.

Out of work and feeling betrayed by union leaders, many of the steelworkers turned to alcoholism, some to crime.

“That period led to the downfall of many, many good men in South Chicago who were steelworkers,” Villareal said. “I was fortunate enough that I had odd goals in my mind.Art was my savior because I was able to concentrate a lot of my energy into my art projects.”

The Mill

Villareal was born in 1950, raised at 85th and Green Bay, in a neighborhood called The Bush.

“The men who were living in that situation didn’t have time to teach their children that there is another way to live other than blue collar,” he said. “You were expected to go right into that mill.”

In high school, Roman started running with the Royal Knights. It was a time when gang fights meant fists, not guns.

“When you were a gang member in those days, you did a lot of parties, dances with the girls, this and that,” he said. “That was the top priority for us at the time.”

To keep the seventeen-year-old off the streets, Roman’s father got him a job at the mill. Immediately after school, Roman would head to the 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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steel mill for a shift from 3-11pm, paying $1.25 an hour or about $8.93 in today’s dollars. It was good money.

“Up to a certain point, as long as you were living at home, especially with a strong Mexican culture family, the majority of the money went to the family,” he said. “Because at the same time, the family was supporting people in Mexico. Even though we were barely making it, they had it worse.”

A Street Kid in ‘Nam

Villareal was drafted in 1968. He went through training, but through a combination of luck and working the system, he never was shipped to Vietnam.

In those years, he started learning more about the war and becoming more political.

“We were completely ignorant of what was going on because we were street kids,” he said. “We were having so much fun being on the street, that we didn’t pay attention to the newspaper. We didn’t know what Vietnam was.”

He received an honorable discharge in 1970, but later got a letter telling him he was ineligible to re-enlist. “Could not conform to military life.”

He and his wife, Maria, did some traveling before going back to Chicago. They started a family. Roman returned to the steel mills.

“When the mills closed during that period, I decided that I was going to be the master of my own fate. I was no longer going to depend on anydamn-body for anything,” he said. “It was over for me.”

Dada at the Bar

Self-taught through library books and with Maria’s support, Roman began making his lifelong interest in art a passion.

“I would go into a neighborhood bar and I would start talking about everything I was doing,” he said, “and they would look at you like you’re a wacko. Who in his right mind in the ‘80s is going to be reading about Dada? They’re steelworkers. They don’t give a shit about that. All they talk about, sports, sex, whatever this and that … Nobody would ever discuss about the theory of art, the revolution, Impressionism. But this is what I was full of.”

He found a community of ex-soldiers from Vietnam who had returned to the neighborhood with broader perspectives and, in some cases, college degrees.

“I never got a degree, but I did go and attend certain classes,” he said.

“Because a lot of times, in the early years of the Art Institute, it was more lax, right? I did a lot of visiting with friends who were [there], to the point where they thought I was actually a student.”

Roman started entering—and winning—local art contests. He and Maria, who is also an artist, worked fairs, festivals, shows, any place that would have them.

“We are survivors in the art world,” Roman said. “I don’t think we’re middle class. I just think we’re survivors. Period.”

‘A mermaid is not political’ When he was doing a show at Hyde Park with artist Jose Moreno, who was visiting Chicago from Mexico, the pair talked about collaborating on a guerilla piece. Soon joined by artists Fred Arroyo and Edfu Kingigna, they decided to make some of Villareal’s sketches of a mermaid into a sculpture by the lake.

“A mermaid is not political, not social,” Roman said. “Nobody could ever get mad at us for making a mermaid.”

They picked a spot in Burnham Park, just north of 39th, where four levels of rock act as revetment, keeping the park from washing away.

Villareal said his next task was to con his 15-year-old daughter Melinda into being the mermaid.

“So we needed a model,” he said. “So I told her, ‘Hey, you know what?

Naah, forget it.’ ‘What?’ She was a contrarian, so you had to start off telling her, ‘No, you can’t do this.’ ‘Do what?’ ‘Well, I’m going to get somebody else.

You won’t be able to sit still.’ ‘Sit still for what?’ ‘Well, we’re going to do this.’

‘I can do it!’”

Melinda laid down on the rock in her street clothes to get the form right, the artists sketched her out. They started the carving that afternoon.

Nobody asks too many questions

It took nine days, showing up in the morning and working late.

“Broad daylight, right in front of everybody,” he said, “because something about Chicago, nobody asks too many questions.”

“We were into our fifth, sixth day that a police lady for the first time — she was having her lunch, a coffee and spotted us and she walks over and goes, ‘What are you guys doing?’ But by that time most of the mermaid was already out and she goes ‘Oh, that’s beautiful! Who commissioned you?’

“And we’re going, ‘Oh, well, this is kind of like a project on our part that we just want to kind of help beautify the lakefront and we’re just kind of, you know.’ And she left us alone. She congratulated us.

“And after a while another police officer came and another one and another one, but nobody ever really said too much to us.”

On the ninth day, La Sirena was complete. Then the four artists left, and the mermaid became a secret spot known only to the locals.

The Mermaid Discovered

julia mellen

The mermaid stayed a secret until 2000, when the Army Corps of Engineers started fixing up the Lake Michigan shoreline in an eight-year, $325 million revetment restoration.

“The last time we went to see her, we were quite concerned because all the equipment was coming near her,” a woman named Gail McClain told the Chicago Sun-Times, which ran a story on the mystery mermaid.

When the story came out Melinda Garcia-Villareal, the mermaid herself, was working downtown, across the street from the Sun-Times’ offices.

On her lunch break, Melinda crossed the street with some photos to show the newspaper where the mermaid really came from. The mythical artist wasn’t a lovelorn romantic or a Columbian Exhibition magnate. He was sitting a few miles away in a VA hospital.

The mermaid’s origins revealed, the community asked the park district to save the mermaid from the Army Corps’ restoration. The park district removed the statue in 2004, putting it into storage. In 2007, a group of students in a community internship program worked with the artists to restore the mermaid and place it in Bessemer Park, by 89th Street in Villareal’s home community of South Chicago. It was moved to its current home in Oakland in 2010.

Today, Roman paints and sculpts. He teaches. He continues to exhibit and he mentors the young artists who show at Under the Bridge.

This story originally appeared as part of Paul Dailing’s 1001 Chicago Afternoons, a web series inspired by Ben Hecht’s original 1001 Afternoons in Chicago. Read more at 1001chicago.com.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Mommy Was a Stripper STEPHEN ENGLISH

T

he day had come. I was officially a man with the arrival of my bouncing baby boy. I planned on becoming the flawless all-American Sears dad dripping testosterone laced sweat like the Marlboro man. I had read all the books on single parenting, rearing disabled children, and Terry Brazelton’s volumes on child development. I wasn’t about to make any mistakes.

In the first hour of having my son, I flooded the Boston airport men’s bathroom with the allegedly disposable diaper. I didn’t make my second parenting error until thirty minutes later when I let go of the very collapsible, cheap stroller handle where I had hung my bags. Tiny twentytwo-pound Jason nearly catapulted into the International Terminal. My next big parenting decision was to switch to cloth diapers.

A painful disaster. I bleached them “clean” and created a diaper rash from hell. His burned little butt was right up there with the first barbecue on my back porch. The first gaggle of guncles came to meet “the disabled child.” They peered in amazement; a gay man with a child was not the Boystown model. To top the afternoon off they watched as he ran, fell and slid palms up against the hot Hibachi. This was only the first three weeks of parenting. I had some things to learn.

Very quickly my life changed from Sesame Street reruns at 5am and the new babysitter dependency. It was time to tackle the whole sports thing. I wasn’t an athlete growing up, to put it mildly! I never quite got the whole competitive sports thing. I joined a gym and learned some men were stronger and some men were weaker. I wasn’t the weakest, to my surprise.

I ventured into a Sportsmart to explore the unknown world, familiar only with the jock straps and darling little running shorts.

I picked up and smelled a baseball mitt. I

remembered my childhood when I was forced to go outside and play baseball in the vacant lot with my humiliated brother and his friends. Those baseball games were my first introduction to a baseball glove.

I loved the cupped shape and I used it to cover my head should a speeding ball smash my face. They took the glove away from me. I was not worthy and therefore relegated to the outfield, the very far outfield. It was just as well. The ball would never come near me so I could weave my dandelion stem jewelry and create pastel fairies made from hollyhock blossoms and buds. I continued to sightsee the aisles of foreign objects. I did recognize badminton and croquet but decided those probably weren’t real Marlboro man sports. “This one I’ll leave to the schools,” I thought. I

books in the Resource Room in our small town. In bold block letters I was drawn to Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee. I spent hours cross-legged, flipping through photos of the infamous queen of burlesque. At nine years old I was learning the art of striptease.

My part-time art switched to occasional one-time performances in Chicago clubs and art events. I transformed my act into stripping as a man to a woman and back to a man in one fifteen-minute segment.

Confused? You should have seen the wide-eyed, mystified, melting faces of my audiences. My committed swan song was to strip as a woman on stage. The Marlboro man ran from the room screaming like a little girl.

During the weeks prior to my show, I bathed my son, read his bedtime story, tucked his “Mom Dog” pound puppy under his Crate and Barrel planes-andtrains comforter and kissed him goodnight. As he slept, the secret magic of shoemaker’s elves stirred.

I cut and sewed and accessorized. I sewed my Vogue pattern Givenchy ball gown in black moiré satin taffeta. I was a classy stripper and rebelled against the traditions of glitter, marabou, and lame. I was not the image your husbands and teenage sons view online.

Each night the sewing machine was pulled out of hiding and whirled through the black fabric so perfect for altering a male body to female by doubling the full skirt to design the illusion of hips. I pulled the exaggerated puff sleeves into the body to soften and narrow the shoulders.

The oversized wide sash tied tight to emphasize the waist. The accessories were added slowly. The deep red almost brown upswept wig easily loosened as clothing fell. The makeup practiced. The eyelashes tested. The seamed black nylons worn with one seam crooked, a trick to draw the eye.

Oh. My God he called me “Mommy.”

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AUGUST 5, 2015

was pretty sure they had coaches, bats and things. Perhaps he’d meet a lesbian coach to fill the missing female in his life, which caused so many people to worry. Folks warned me he’d never develop.

In reorganizing and tidying up my life, I did have one last commitment I had to fulfill. I was a man of my word. It would be my last hurrah to a past life more colorful than Elmo’s letter G and the Count’s number 3 that filled my early mornings.

Several years prior to fatherhood I had a part-time job that took me to small towns in Indiana and Illinois on random weeknights. My parents always wondered how I would ever use my theatre major with a costume design concentration, and this job was the solution. I had become a stripper.

I had different idols when I was growing up. Remember, my early life was not about Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. I discovered my icon on the shelves of heavy

Finally, the night before my swan song, I stood in full attire and accessories down to makeup, eyelashes and painted burgundy red fake nails adhered with florist’s clay. I stared into the full-length built-in mirror at the end of our hall. Everything was perfect until I heard the now horrible but familiar sound of plastic footed pajamas.

God help me, he was awake. My concerned parental instinct flew me to his side, my gown rustling and billowing all way, high heels clicking. I leaned over him and asked, “What’s wrong?” His little fist rubbed his sleepy eyes as he looked up at me puzzled and said.(wait for it)...“Mommy? Mommy?”

Oh. My God he called me “Mommy.” I immediately ripped off my wig and dipped into the secret parental lying resource we all possess in case of extreme emergency. “Oh, honey, this is my funny Halloween costume just like the silly pound puppy costume

daddy is making for you. Halloween is so goofy.”

I quickly ushered him to bed, hoping he’d fall back to sleep quickly and think he had a nightmare.

“Oh, my God he called me Mommy,” I thought as I clicked back down the hall, happy the florist’s clay really worked. As I stared back in the mirror, disheveled, I thought of what I used to tell first time parents. “Read everything you can. Listen to everyone’s advice. Tell everyone to bugger off and rear your child the way you know is right for you and start saving for the best therapist money could buy to correct your parenting screw ups.”

I’ve often thought of that evening thirty years ago and still roll my eyes. lexi drexelius I remember my role as a single parent being both mommy and daddy. I know the Native American term Berdache, meaning a person of Two Spirits, one processing both genders. The Berdache is well respected and honored as a spiritual mediator and healer.

Maybe it was my two spirits who reared my son, both Mommy and Daddy.

Daddy first met him and questioned his ability to handle drooling and a three year old still not potty-trained. Mommy hushed him and said, “This is our son.” Mommy feared the learned doctors were correct in their deadly prognosis he would never speak or read or develop. Daddy insisted he was talking and no one listened and understood his language. It was Mommy who wrapped her arms around him against her naked chest. Skin to skin, with hope the child who had never bonded would feel her heart and miraculously they would become one. She prayed for the day he would “attach” and be

able to look directly into her eyes. Daddy told her to be strong and steadfast with her love. Daddy envied every woman’s ability to give birth and cursed every woman who complained she had to breast feed. They went to school staffings where Daddy would wear his power suits and blatantly charm the female-dominated meetings. He held Mommy in check when she morphed into an angry jungle beast ready to devour anyone denying her baby his rights.

When he fell down, Daddy said get up.

Mommy kissed his ego and wounds. Daddy was proud when he saw him perfectly roller skate down the sidewalk. The paralysis had somehow disappeared. Daddy laughed when his son faked awkwardness near older girls. Mommy smiled as girls grabbed his hand to help him skate and said, “Yeah Daddy, we got a straight one on our hands.”

Daddy was horrified when he learned days later the truth about the three-inch deep slash in his hand. The wound puzzled the emergency room doctors. He learned his son had intervened when a gangbanger was harassing a young woman. His simple confronting face-to-face retort, “That’s no way to treat a lady!” escalated into a knife fight. Mommy was hysterical when he told them the police almost arrested him. Daddy laughed inside with pride when he learned his young son had knocked the gangbanger out with a single punch. Mommy lectured him on safety and instructions on calling the police. The young man he was becoming honored Daddy and Mommy. Mommy and Daddy fell asleep holding each other emotionally drained and softly sighed as they often did after his surgeries and traumas of childhood. They were relieved to have each other.

So you see, a single parent, a Two Spirit parent, has many switching roles. Mommy is Daddy, Daddy is Mommy. Some nights, Mommy is a stripper.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Jones Commercial, My First Job, and a Whole New World Outside of Englewood ELAINE HEGWOOD BOWEN

M

y first venture into the workforce in 1972 was as a secretary for the City of Chicago, Department of Water and Sewers. I was offered this job during my senior year at Jones, as all seniors had to work a half day. When I started working for the City, my father helped me in the only way he knew how. It was normally my mother to whom we went for advice, sometimes to just talk things out. But I remember before I started my job at City Hall he told me to say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir,” when I was addressing the white people downtown. When my father advised me to show deference to the white people with whom I would come into contact with at my first job, the first thing that he was referring to was that old Southern, colored idea of inferiority that he believed I should consider when dealing with white people. In that moment, it struck me that no matter how cute or smart I thought I was, wearing my nice little dresses and stockings and shoes, plopping on a nice hat and pulling on gloves, my father thought that I still had to make sure I kept my place and didn’t disrespect the white people downtown.

The comings and goings at City Hall were something to behold for a sixteen-year-old girl from the South Side. Powerbrokers would come through the hallways, dressed in nice suits, ties, leather loafers and pinky rings, while carrying leather briefcases. They would go for lunch at restaurants with such names as Mayor’s Row, Hinkey Dink’s Tavern and Counselor’s Row. I was working at the City when the first Mayor Daley passed away in

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December 1976. Richard J. Daley had ruled the city for twenty-one years and afterward his body would lie in the hallways of the building that he had known so well. His son Richard M. Daley served as Chicago’s mayor from 1989 until 2011, when he decided not to run again. But before the son came into office, Chicago witnessed the election of its first African-American mayor, Harold “you want Harold, you got him” Washington. Washington ran a successful grassroots campaign and was adored by the masses. He was

Lerner Shops and other stores in the downtown area. An older co-worker taught me about buying quality instead of quantity; therefore, Marshall Field’s seemed like the best choice. It wasn’t cheap and there weren’t many black salespeople working there at the time. As a matter of fact, at one time Field’s had a history of not being too welcoming to minorities, but I was too young to or get involved in political correctness by boycotting the store. I also learned about the Millionaire’s Club where you could get a good meal

The comings and goings at City Hall were something to behold for a sixteen-year-old girl from the South Side. first elected in April 1983 and won re-election in 1987. Unfortunately, he died in office in November 1987.

His personality was infectious and the city mourned his passing. It left many African Americans wondering just when we would see another black mayor. We weren’t even thinking at the time that we would see something more profound than another black mayor. We would live to see Obama elected to the highest office in our nation—not once, but two times.

Hanging out with my coworkers during this time meant discovering the upscale Marshall Field & Company (Macy’s), after I had been used to buying dresses and clothes at

AUGUST 5, 2015

or a Sloe Gin Fizz or Tom Collins.

We swore that they must have been mixing those drinks in the bathtub because you got free drinks with your meals. But they were not that strong.

I ate my first lobster there, some time in my senior year of high school, and brought the shell home for a souvenir.

I also discovered a club on West 87th Street, in Gresham that is still there now, Reeses. It wasn’t a matter of trying to be grown; it was more a situation where I was young and working with a slightly older crew, lunchtime and events right after work exposed me to what were then considered the finer or more exciting things in life.

There was a man who preached

with a bullhorn and small amplifier.

“You can’t get to Heaven smoking that reefer,” he admonished passersby.

“And those of you who are living in sin won’t get to Heaven, either,” he proclaimed. I would see this man on the streets of downtown Chicago preaching the Gospel in the early 1970s and he is still there today. My buddies and I would also sometimes go to Flo’s, Beef and Brandy, and The Court to eat meals. All located downtown, these places welcomed the younger crowd, especially those who had money to pay for their meals.

It was so cool to be downtown working. It made me feel more mature and it certainly helped my parents since I had my own money.

This first sadly opened my eyes to the discrimination that prevailed in Chicago. One of the disconcerting aspects about working for the City at that time was that many of my coworkers were from Bridgeport, a neighborhood made famous because the Daley family, which produced two Chicago mayors, came from that area.

Another outstanding reference to Bridgeport came later in 1997 with the well-publicized beating of thirteenyear-old Lenard Clark, a black teen who lived in a nearby housing project, by a group of young white youth in an area bordering Bridgeport. He was just riding his bike in the neighborhood after playing basketball. He was targeted and kicked into a coma that resulted in brain damage.

Newspaper reports of the ensuing trial were graphic in nature and recounted sentiments from across the nation. An Associated Press article about the trial, written by Mike Robinson on April 19, 1998 and titled

Reflection ELAINE HEGWOOD BOWEN

I cried and thanked God today as I passed by the corner.

No, it’s not the corner... where drug deals are made where prostitutes ply their trade where alcoholics relive better days where undercover cops look the other way where children can no longer play Nor is it the corner... where the bus driver dropped off his fare where newsboys keep the world aware But, it’s the corner... where my so-called “soul mate” decided that beating me was his “by any means necessary” where, among the wealthy high-rises, while many were laughing, living life to the fullest, celebrating, I was cowering, trying to find my piece (peace) of the corner. courtesy of the author

“Trial is putting racism in Chicago’s spotlight”, began this way: When Lenard Clark was found crumpled and unconscious on a South Side street, the victim of a brutal beating, police had no doubt about the motive.

The black thirteen-year-old had bicycled into a mostly white neighborhood one night last spring, and the color of his skin apparently sparked an attack so violent it touched a nerve across the nation.

President Clinton asked Americans to pray for the youngster left comatose by a ‘savage and senseless assault driven by nothing but hate.’

Thirteen months later, the three young white men charged with trying to kill Lenard Clark are about to go on trial in a case that dramatically underscores the nation’s unresolved racial tensions. The scene of the beating, Armour Square, is at the edge of Bridgeport, a neighborhood

of tidy blue collar homes that has given Chicago four mayors in fifty years—two of them named Daley.

When I was working and had associates from Bridgeport, that area was off-limits to blacks. A coworker having a baby shower was told by her landlord that he better not ever see her inviting niggers to her apartment or he would evict her. She was very apologetic. I just brushed it off, pretending or masking that I didn’t want to go anyway.

Originally published in Chapter FIfteen of Old School Adventures from Englewood—South Side of Chicago

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

Dear Teacher VINCENTE “SUBVERSIVE” PEREZ

Teacher, I need help…

I know you gave me that homework last week But last night I ain’t eat, How I’m supposed to be hungry for knowledge…

Teacher, I know you got big dreams for me But, I can’t even spell college I got a collage of thoughts inside But I was never taught to rely On something I knew I would never be given…

Like the time my father left He said, “I’ll see you soon” But, too soon he forgot his words So when I st-st-st-umble over long words Know it’s cause we live worlds apart…

Every walk home is a signed death sentence Every neighborhood a war zone Teacher, you say the pen is mightier than the sword But you’ve never seen a gun, like a pencil, Erase a life We are all inkwells But the only way our story Is told is when Another life is blotted out When their ink spills Carcasses like empty cartridges line my street…

We are treated like old typewriters with no return There is no return so… why invest?

They say the blacker The berries the sweeter the juice And we are all strange fruit to you…

So in the summer heat We ferment Until the blood of Christ Seeps into our concrete...

The city soaks it up, while we soak it in…

Teacher, you say cursing ain’t speaking intelligently But I don’t know how else to fucking talk about this I just want to scream fuck you, fuck this,

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AUGUST 5, 2015

william camargo

Everyone’s tryna fuck me The system just fucks kids…

I know they ain’t give you much…

So just do what you can…

Ok, ok, uh I’m sorry I cuss-ded And sorry I talk-ded wrong that one time But I just wish sometime Someone askded me how I felt.

But please teacher, Teach me what to do with these hands

Cause I know you scared… you should ask us If we scared too...

I know you scared…

Me too…

Ask us, I know I am They just look past us I just ask why ma’am But I guess this ain’t my role So I’ll just take my seat Sorry I raised my hand That’s just some shit I needed to release…

Damn, I did it again…

Teacher I need help

I ain’t never been taught To raise them to ask questions I always raised them to solve problems Hand to hand transactions make money I know you want me to see hope But in Chicago people die when it gets sunny…

See these hands Fit around guns Around mics Around throats… so perfectly But these hands get tired So please teach me what to do with these hands…

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

Goldfish AMELIA DMOWSKA

amelia dmowska

M

y winter boots are soaked in gold; my toes tingle as I dip them into the puddle of light that pours from the lamp above. Miniature suns in golden boxes bob over the wooden boards of the “L” station—artificial suns whose heat sizzles in the cold. Mud and ice are caked into a trimming that borders the planks of the station, lining the edges of the benches and seeping into the crevices between the train tracks. It hasn’t snowed for a few days, but the gray afternoon clouds above are heavy, expectant reminders that the real sun hasn’t colored the light for a week or two.

The Green Line train heading south to Ashland/63rd suddenly roars past me in rapid strokes of dull metal and neon green, interrupting the otherwise quiet dwindling of the meager afternoon light. I was supposed to get on that train, but I just huddle further backwards into the light box, turning my numb nose and cheeks upwards towards the pulsing heat.

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AUGUST 5, 2015

As the warmth colors my face, bundled-up figures begin wading into my pool. They spread their gloved fingers through the currents of light and create ripples in my puddle. A woman’s bent-over figure stumbles into the yellow glow, tugging behind her a small waddling bundle of cloth. Splotched with pink roses, her cheeks bloom as she breathes out, adorning her scarf with the glitter of crystallized breath. Her young daughter’s toffee eyes are barely visible between the amorphous wool wrapped around her head. The mother scoops her daughter up into her arms, closer to the heat, and the bundle of cloth squirms until settling there. The beads on her braids clink and chime like miniature bells as the girl lifts her tiny face towards the light, unleashing a bundle of hair and a small nose from the wool’s embrace. She sniffs the fresh air.

Chicago has a strange winter smell. It’s as if the cold erases the entire atmosphere, creating a blank slate that amplifies each distinct scent. Warmth muddles smells, concocting a heavy perfume of flowers and sunlight and breezes into one muggy whiff. The cold, though, is a blank chalkboard that traces the trajectory of each brightly-colored line as it flows by—sharp, crisp, clear. The fragrance of smoky wood gently floats into the train station, and I can almost see it spiraling through the air. Dark green, like a forest, the scent skips along the planks, cradles our noses, and melts into our pool of light.

Another scent slowly crawls towards us like a yellow inch-worm. It smells like decay, like old staircases and sour milk mixed with the tang of urine. A haggard man hesitantly tiptoes into our puddle, grunting something in a heavy breath mixed with the clink of bottles in the plastic bags he’s clutching between the exposed fingertips of his frayed black gloves. He ripples the light, and the waves push the woman backwards a few steps. I try to acknowledge the man’s grunt but my joints feel too stiff to move and it’s so much easier to stand immobile, letting the waves wash over me. Slowly, the yellow inch-worm dissipates with the icy gusts of air as it continues to crawl along the periphery of our circle.

A few more hunched figures stumble in, a few stumble out. People stumble in the winter, it seems. No one assuredly faces the Cold with a head held high and shoulders arched backwards. Instead, arms are crossed, eyes are watery, backs are slumped. The light dwindles further, but I stay, huddled, in the corner of the box, momentarily connected to a few other people by the same yellow glow, like a yellow string that wraps around our ankles.

Sometimes, the distant outline of a figure refuses to enter the circle, standing on the periphery of the station, staring down the tracks into the city’s mouth while enveloped in its frosty breath. When the outline glances back towards the yellow box illuminating this eclectic handful of Chicago, I feel we are I feel less like people and more like fish—goldfish hooked on a line, temporarily tethered together to the yellow lights above.

Swimming in a circle around and around in our yellow pool.

The light above unexpectedly flickers and then gives out; the golden water suddenly floods out from beneath our feet, pouring onto the wooden platform and dribbling down onto the tracks. The line snaps, and we disperse, marionettes free from the puppeteer’s string. The other suns continue to bob along the rest of the station, and some begin to stumble towards them. I walk to the edge with teeth chattering as I look at the city’s own jagged skyscraper incisors, waiting for the next train to arrive.

Selected Rooms #10 ANDREW LOVDAHL

I

t was Red who chose our apartments, and sometimes they were hardly to be believed. “I’ve got a system,” she explained once, when I decided to press the issue. “Fascism is a system,” I muttered from the other room. But systems were not her strong suit; had she said it in appeasement?

Appeasement was not her strong suit either, which is one reason we got along.

If she did have a system, it left no apparent trace in the physical world, and only every now and then could I catch an indirect glimpse of its transactions.

Sometimes she’d bring me on a long walk without explaining the object, and then point out of the blue at some building we were already passing: “We’re moving there in the fall.” I would look at her, quietly and expectantly, and sometimes she was thus moved to add a light comment: “I saw it from the train. The sun comes up behind it.”

It was technically Pilsen, but practically nowhere. A little wedge of quiet streets slowly choked down to nothing by the encroaching river, with a semiprivate alley wriggling out onto Cermak with a gasp at the last possibility.

Somebody had painted a series of watermelons all along this escapement, stopping abruptly above an open manhole, to which I often put my ear. I remember an odor that was green and cutting, and strong fences running three-quarters around vacant lots, with the fourth side left open as can be. I remember well-packed rooms, cunning courtyards, and caverns into which windows–but no doors–opened, with moony stone floors lightly dressed in trash, and green for a long time after the rain.

Ours was an off-kilter building of three stories, which had, apparently, once aspired to four. Though the facade still bore the tent of an attic, there was nothing behind it but a flat cap of tar and flashing, accessible by a small hatch. I went up there early on the very first morning, perhaps trying to make sense of Red’s description, when gradually I became aware of a sound of distant, repeated shattering. The regularity suggested a church bell, if it were broken by every strike. Scanning this way and that, and further and further out, I finally settled on an industrious little figure stirring in the weeds by the raised expressway, which at that location was just beginning its long and linear decline, much in the manner of empires and my eyesight.

This man (for it seemed a man) was forever raising and letting fall some sort of sledgehammer into the ground at his feet. I could appreciate that it was heavy from its long, slow upswing and the way it soared happily back down.

The funny thing was that at such a distance, the moment of impact and the noise of the impact did not occur for me simultaneously. Rather, it was precisely when the sledge was highest that I heard the tinkling collision. So it was down in silence, up with a crash, down in silence, up again with a crash, and without too much effort I convinced myself that the man was facing the other way round from what I had first assumed. Now, he was striking not at the ground, but over and over at an invisible wall that confined him to his patch on the roadside. I wondered how long he’d been laboring there, and whether anybody awaited his eventual return, and whether it would be appropriate to head over there myself and help him swing from the opposite side.

Red poked her long head up through the hatch, shrouded in steam from a jar of miso broth. She had recently developed a tremendous taste for it.

“Morning,” I said. “Have you been for a walk?”

“Ye-es,” she said thoughtfully, appraising the sun, which was flaming in the windy sky over our shoulders. “I saw them building floats, for the Fire Festival. And, oh! Over there there’s some fella smashing toilets, like he’s trying to save his life.”

julia hanson

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

Selected Rooms #44 ANDREW LOVDAHL

amber collins-parnell

T

he worst of last winter found us in the first-floor unit of an extremely undistinguished graystone, somewhere near the elbow of Independence Boulevard.

Often I went outside and looked it over wondering what Red had ever seen in it. From a distance it looked like an antique refrigerator; from up close it looked like contractors had practiced on it. In the soggy alley one of the windows was shivered; someone had lined it with a cheap terrycloth blanket that was covered with Ayanami Rei in a series of provocative poses. When I took out the trash I was subject to her bored gaze, while her colors bled eerily across the white space.

What I remember most is not being there. I peeled a student ID off the floor of the bus and used it to get into the university library, which was obscenely cozy and open on holidays. I didn’t push my luck by trying to check something out, but I could pull from the bookstacks and read in the aisles nice and close, as it were, to the source. My favorite shelves were along an overhang that looked down on an office full of clerks, and whatever they spoke amongst themselves floated readily up to my nook.

Most of the library staff seemed to live eons out of the neighborhood. The streets and garages around the campus filled and emptied 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

AUGUST 5, 2015

each weekday like a water clock. I liked to imagine that the daily fluctuation of weight on the land might strike a resonant frequency and eventually build up to a rupture. The younger librarians spoke of places like Avondale, Edgewater, and Humboldt Park, consistently about ten blocks shy of fashionable, whereas the old-timers’ vocabulary was riddled with the morose long vowels of Harvey, Dolton, Orland.

One woman, as I came to understand, lived all the way across State Line and drove in every morning on the Skyway. I started keeping an atlas at hand in the stacks, and when she mentioned an unfamiliar town or landmark I would circle it on the page. These graphite stars in their constellation, extending well out of the world of the city’s public transportation, were unknown and almost literally unknowable to me. I took great pains to fill these blank spaces in my imagination with the fleeting details of roofers, live-in nephews, and Aldi supermarkets.

That winter was almost too cold for snow, but there was one week that nonetheless turned out disastrously icy. Everyone came in ten minutes late with shaking knees and voices, but no one could toe with the woman from State Line. On each of that week’s five mornings, I heard her clatter through the door with her various provisions, arrange herself in her high seat, and then, upon catching her

breath, begin an account of her troubles. It was striking how nobody interrupted her, not even with so much as an “ah,” and it was striking how everyone remained silent for a good while afterward, typing with a respectful delicacy broken by a student worker’s rude and unrelated laugh. I quickly began to look forward to these chronicles, and now I regret that I was not able to record them.

What impressed me most was their adherence to form, the regular procession of the same dramatic elements in a fashion that I suspect ancient audiences would have appreciated. They began with a note of optimism (“I was out of the garage at five-thirty sharp”) and continued with a note of optimism sustained (“the plows had come through on time for once, so I didn’t have to dig out at the intersection…”). But then came the language of the lonely pilgrimage, of each person against the vastness of their sorrow, of the smallness of each car against the vastness of the traffic, of the small mistake ten miles ahead and the pitiless chain of consequences, which flowed back down the expressway, and into all its blocked-up tributaries, down the county roads and into the very carports of northwestern Indiana.

Suddenly came the collision. The damage was more or less severe (usually less, on account of the speed), and the other driver was more or less at fault, but always and suddenly it came. Here the narrator stressed the absurdity of being long in the company of someone who has done you ill, of sitting side by side with the offender in the motionless scrum of the exit ramp, trying to reckon the damage to one’s own car through the very mirrors of the damaging instrument. Many muddled looks were exchanged through cloudy windows, many words angrily mouthed but unheard.

Through a mysterious alchemy of morals, the other driver’s shame was gradually transmuted into righteousness, his own sin forgotten in a growing conviction that the librarian was truly the one to blame. All this time the two of them continued to sit there side by side. Then came the memorable violent-colored phrase, after which some stories began to diverge: “...and then he got out of his car.”

The book slipped from my hand, and I wondered what time it was getting to be. Trailing off to sleep against the radiator that would eventually leave griddle marks on my backpack, I saw a vast highway set on stilts, reaching from a white place to a white place on a precarious irregular arc. Invisible the ground below, invisible the ends of the lines of cars, each one powered by small explosions, each one tainting the gassy air that recirculates through the dashboard heaters and then the drivers’ open mouths. And now Red and I come floating down on the wind, invisible to the commuters below. Moving in the medians from door to door, she consoles the hearts of the stricken with motions of the hand, so at least nobody need get out of his car. I, of course, have no such talent, but I can follow where she leads, generously distributing cheap terrycloth blankets to this stalled race of men, that they might line the shivering windows of their lives.

Pace COREY HALL

M

raziel puma

idnight on a dark city street. There are three in a car. There you are in a dying pair of Reeboks. Should you run? Of course. So you’ve got a few extra pounds that have been slowing down your life. You have eluded German Shepherds and your ex-girlfriend’s other boyfriend before, so why should tonight be any different? Can you run? Well, with that deep-dish pizza balanced on your right arm, and that bag of wings balanced on your left, you might not be as elusive as you would like.

“You’re gonna have to give that up, Holmes!” says an ugly dude behind the wheel. Suddenly, you consider sharing: really, now, all this food could be a decent meal for the four of you. So what if you had to pay for it all?

“Y-Y-Yy’all wanna split this with me?” you ask, trying your best to sound like Mister Rogers Black. Instead, your voice squeaks and squeals like a sorry saxophone. Your body goes numb.

“You better give that up, BOY!” says an even uglier man next to the driver.

The B of his “BOY!” thuds against your chest like a deep, bass bomb.

Now your brain is nothing but bone. You move to your right. The car follows. You stop. It stops. You look at the quiet, darkened house behind you.

Should you scream?

Somehow, you find the power to lift your eyes above the car’s hood.

Something looks familiar. You shake your head a few times and recognize your house. You then return to your senses as–is this possible?–another being clearly even uglier than what you have seen so far approaches you. You then assess the situation at hand: three of the most heartstopping forms of ugly are trying to take your pizza and chicken wings. You spent your last $20 on these wings and things.

You have decided to take some preventive, proactive action.

You suck in that gut.

You pray for movement. You balance your purchase on your left arm.

Before you are aware of it, you feel something forcing you across the street.

You hear another shout from the Chorus of Ugly now behind you.

You then recognize the front door of your house.

You feel a hand attached to your body reach inside your pocket and pull out your keys. And, for the first time ever, you pick the right key, and it goes into the lock on the first try.

The force of something then pushes you inside the house. You look over your shoulder and see something round in the area where the door will close.

It closes. With a slam.

Something warm is on your face. You know it is blood, as you recognize its maroonish hue on the wall next to you.

Never mind the blood, you reason.

It’s time to eat.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

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24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

AUGUST 5, 2015

Bronzeville

ELBERT TAVON BRIGGS

south side ear hustle birthed verse like pollen in winds a crack in the stone harlem’s new moon rose here renaissance bronzeville some call it black art colors are so natural maybe art is art bronzeville had bordersgwendolyn’s pen enlarged them bronzeville had borders ears hailed mahalia streams of armstrong and the king creoled through bronzeville archibald motley guggenheimed to paris then painted bronzeville southside eldzier cortor’s brush stroked ebony crowns, legs, hips, gowns nubian queens of bronzeville lorraine penned drama dried grapes hoped for less sun thirst for urban rain blues and gospel forecast for stockyards of toil pullman’s lived that art richard was so wright southern to northern black clouds breathed native suns rising and setting young black winds burst angry gale storms black air dying and demon noises vanishing access choices makes storm fronts wild and ominous a crack in the stone harlem’s new moon rose here renaissance bronzeville some call it black art colors are so natural maybe art is art

julie wu

bronzeville had borders gwendolyn’s pen enlarged them bronzeville had borders AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

Grandma’s Room TONY LINDSAY

We never slept in this room without Grandma, and since she’s gone we did not want to sleep in here now, but Mama said the bed in the other room was too little for me and Richard to sleep in together. She is sleeping in that bed, and Daddy is sleeping on the couch in the living room. We had to come down here because of Grandma’s funeral. She was Daddy’s mama, but Aunt Chloe, who lives in Chicago with us, raised him.

Aunt Chloe didn’t come down here with us. She said road trips were way behind her. Richard and I like road trips because of the snacks and seeing cows and horses and other stuff out of the car windows. Daddy calls Aunt Chloe ‘Mama’ instead of calling Grandma ‘Mama.’ He called Grandma ‘Ma’am.’

Aunt Chloe is me and Richard’s favorite aunt, and that includes both sides of the family. Aunt Chloe is the best. She lives downtown, and we get to go over her house for all the free concerts and stuff in the park. Mama says Aunt Chloe can live downtown because she’s rich and has more money than Oprah Winfrey.

“Do you hear that?” Richard asks.

“Yeah, I hear it,” I say.

I heard the noise a while ago, but I was hoping he didn’t hear it because one strange sound in Grandma’s house leads my scaredy-cat little brother to a hundred questions especially with the funeral and stuff. He is five years old, and he thinks that dying is like catching a cold, and he wants to make sure him, me, Daddy, and Mama do not do anything that causes us to die like Grandma. I keep telling him Grandma died because she was sick for so long, not because she did something, but he’s just a little kid, so he doesn’t understand.

“What do you think that is?”

“The wind,” I say, knowing he won’t believe me.

“The wind doesn’t scratch.”

“It does if it’s blowing a tree branch against the window.”

There are no trees outside of Grandma’s bedroom window, but I think maybe Richard will not remember that. He scoots closer to me and puts his big head on my pillow. There was only one pillow on Grandma’s bed when we got here, and since I got in first, I grabbed it. But because Richard is scared of the dark, and because of the funeral stuff, I don’t push him away from me.

“But it sounds so close.”

I can smell the last Reese’s Cup on his breath. Mama gave it to him because he whined for it, like a baby. The scratching sound is close. It’s right behind the headboard down at the bottom.

“Go cut on the light Malcolm.”

“Nope, Daddy said go to sleep,” I say. “If he sees the lights on he’ll get mad.”

“If you don’t go cut the light on, I’m going to scream, and he will get mad anyway.”

“And beat your butt.”

“Our butts.”

He’s right. If he screams, Daddy will come in the room and get us both because he will think we’re playing, and he will spank me the hardest because I am seven years old and the oldest. I snatch the pillow from under Richard’s head and push him away.

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AUGUST 5, 2015

dmitry samarov

He makes me sick thinking he’s smart.

“Are you going to cut the light on?” he asks. When I look over to him, I don’t see him because it’s so dark.

I throw back the blanket and sheet and swing my legs around and my feet down to the carpet because I do want the lights on, and I do want to see what’s making that noise.

I can’t even see my feet. Daddy cut the hall light out, so even the little light that comes in under the door is gone. When we slept in here with Grandma, she always had a prayer candle burning, so it was not black like it is now. They don’t have streetlights in the country. Where we live it never gets this dark. We have streetlights that shine through our windows all the time.

“I can’t see,” I tell my brother.

“There is nothing to see, just stand up and swing your arms around until you feel the string then pull it.”

He is too short and too scared to help me, but he has a mouth full of ideas. I start swinging my arms around and take a couple of steps. Instead of feeling something with my fingers, I feel something with my toes, and it doesn’t feel right because whatever it is feels like it’s feeling me, so I start dancing around and jump back in bed.

“What? What’s wrong with you?”

“I think it’s bugs in the carpet.”

“Bugs?”

He’s almost screaming.

“Shhh, you know Grandma got bugs around here,” I tell him.

“On the back porch and a little in the kitchen, but not in here.”

We are both sitting up in the middle of the bed.

“This the country, bugs are everywhere,” I say.

The scratching sound is getting louder.

“Go cut on the light Malcolm, please. The bugs won’t hurt your feet.”

“Spiders will.”

Could the bugs be climbing up the headboard and making that scratching sound? Are we surrounded by bugs? The scratching sound is moving up, getting closer to us.

I tell my brother, “Go on and scream. When Daddy comes in he will cut on the lights and see whatever it is making the noise.”

“I don’t want a whipping.”

“He’s not going to whip us if he sees the bugs.”

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daaaddyy!”

“That’s enough, dang.”

We are both listening hard, but all we hear is the scratching.

“Scream again.”

“Daddy! It’s bugs in here. Daddy!”

The scratching noise is halfway up the headboard.

“They’re behind the bed, Malcolm. Daddy!”

“No they’re not, it just sounds like that because it’s so quiet.”

“Are you scared?”

“Nope.”

“Then go cut on the light.”

“Nope, call him again.”

“Daddy! Daddy!”

The door opens, but the light that comes in is only shining around the person who opened the door. No, the light is not around her but coming from her, out of her. She is a light, like a Santa Claus with a light bulb in the middle.

“That’s Grandma,” Richard whispers. “That’s not right, is it?

The cemetery people put her in the ground. Why is she here with us?”

I feel my brother digging his stubby fingernails into my arm.

“No, it just looks like her,” I say.

“It is her.” He’s crying.

Grandma moves from the door towards us bringing light with her.

“You’d better not pee in my bed, Richard Wellington Brown III,” she says. “That’s a new mattress. It cost me $375 dollars.”

It is Grandma. She’s at the side of the bed, glowing, glowing like . . . like her prayer candles. She told Richard not to pee, but it is me that has to hold my water with all my might.

“I got a kitten under my bed. She was the runt of the litter, real sickly, and hasn’t meowed yet. You boys are going to take care of her. If you don’t . . . I will be back to see you, and you won’t like me when I come back.”

(I don’t think we like her now.)

She bends down and comes up with a kitten and throws it in the bed with us.

“I named her Chloe, after my sister,” she says. “Call her anything else and I will come back to see you.”

The door slams shut and Grandma is gone. I have the baby cat in my arms against my chest. Richard stops digging into my arm.

The door opens again, and this time the light from the hall shows us Daddy.

“Why aren’t you boys sleeping?”

“Grandma, dead Grandma was here, and she gave us a kitten.”

Richard says reaching to pet the cat.

“What did you say?”

“He’s not lying, Daddy. She was here, and she gave us this cat, and she said we have to keep her, and she named her Chloe.”

“You two ate some of those crab apples didn’t you?”

We did eat some crab apples. I ate four and Richard ate three, but what does that have to do Grandma being here? Daddy walks in the room and pulls the string, cutting on the light.

The baby cat is snow white with one little black spot between her eyes.

“You lucky she’s cute,” Daddy says. “Your Mama will probably let you keep her, but keep the Grandma story to yourselves. If she thinks you are lying, no kitten. Now go to sleep.” Daddy pulls the string, but when he leaves he lets the door stay halfway open, so the light stays in with us.

“Do you think Mama will still let us get a puppy, since we have a kitten now?” Richard says.

“I hope so, because you can’t play fetch with a baby cat.”

“Give her to me. I want to hold her.”

“Here, take her.” I toss the kitten in his lap. “I want a puppy, not a stupid cat.”

The room turns black again.

“I am not playing with you, Malcolm James Mercer Brown.

You better take care of my kitten.”

I don’t see her, but I hear her.

The light comes back and my brother is sitting in the middle of the bed, petting the white cat with the black spot and laughing at me.

“And don’t forget, her name is Chloe,” he says, grinning.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27

31st Street Beach DAKOTA LOESCH

there’s a boy in bronzeville who will kiss you with no shoes on

Bryn Mawr

on the long walk back from the beach where his big cousin goes to smoke dope

DAKOTA LOESCH

where some old teamsters might be buried where you can see that sunken ship peak out

on dyeing a green river greener

where the sand bar drops off steep and sudden

and avoiding ketchup at all costs

and he’ll tell you it’s named something greek

on a communal prayer

and he’ll say it belonged to jimmy hoffa and he’ll ask if you wanna get high and he’ll tell you you’re gorgeous and he’ll tell you he loves you and whatever other little lies pop into his half-stoned head when you taste his liar tongue

for sixty-degree weather lexi drexelius

Little Brother’s New Tattoo DAKOTA LOESCH

well into late september or (fingers crossed) october on ghosts and marshall fields on the just-under three million living here (not including us) on saturday night

like copper and buffalo nickels

he wants to get a tribute tattoo

when our favorite 4am

and that, my dear friend, that is

of Maya Angelou

stayed open until 5am

where you will be when you realize there’s a reason why you avoid the lake

which i think is lovely and completely beautiful i’m just trying to convince him to get it somewhere other than

on the sidewalk when you kissed me on the mouth

his right ass cheek, and

under the train tracks

not his left ass cheek either

and the confetti sparks

because that ass cheek

came raining down

already has a portrait

when i realized that this

of gonzo flying away

was the best life of my life

holding a bunch of balloons

and it would be several days before i remembered that i left my wallet on the bar

28 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

AUGUST 5, 2015

On Summer AERIN COOPER

1. tell me who has experienced happiness most— two relentless boys at it again right under the living room window. By now, a part of the rhythm. I call this life, here at my corner.

but the heart still thumps and rocks steady like a southbound 4 King Drive on a Sunday.

3.

Check out the present moon, high, high, in our toxic sherbet sky. Check out the house at the end of Mango Street.

In the city, what I love is a community garden, the one next door is full of orange lilies and tall stalks, painted rocks, thin trees, and believe it or not butterflies.

The sun shines different

Which in many ways heals me, holds me together. Checks my uppity art school ass and brings me back to sweet Annie’s porch and Uncle Bop Splitting catfish on a table and spitting bull to no one as I blow bubbles, out and up.

on this side of town. Perhaps the old & new air pollution. Perhaps the difference in laughter.

can I feel a community slipping over me, and how does that happen? You scratch my back.

Maybe boldness might save us, wielding the machete and calling our own names calling our own shots.

There is music on this side, a beautiful holler connecting mouth to sky. A guitar, or a horn glowing red, just out front, or passing as you look back.

I scratch yours.

As we wake in the morning to the same sun I know we are brothers and sisters. My dear, as siblings what a volatile time we are living.

Admittedly, it takes several forms.

Fried dough. Sugared Milk. Ice.

Blocks of color deep deep blues, and juicy yellow that amount to an old mountain green

What happened to that? Perhaps it starts in me a slip that shifts and shakes up the math of me VS. them timetables, new reductions, pointed capitalism, no sunlight segregation, ghost school, automaton.

one on the outskirts of Mexico City, or somewhere in China covered in mist, or Puerto Rico, or Nicaragua with its 4 king volcanoes, or flat top Kilimanjaro in the distance,

Where is that human touch?

That good day, that hello gorgeous, when I was holding myself as I rounded the corner of State and 68th

and now Sears, or do I mean, Daley

a mechanic reminded me we are both human and more.

which I can see outside my bedroom windows. The sunrise bold as my mother waking.

2.

It’s here and alive baby a tad underground, queer, dirty,

When Nina Simone played Chicago, on her last world tour they say she was a presence to behold, but she was tired.

Of what you ask?

Holding her stance.

Maybe art that heals will save us, art that talks to more than the artist.

Highly sensitive, charged, a pregnant moment in history that needs to be popped, opened up, read and cleaned off with water and loving hands.

Hands that know what was, and what can be, a knowing driven by actually giving a damn.

A back against the current. A concerned raised hand in the classroom.

Someone gasping for air.

Teachers in all shapes,sizes, genders, and colors on the bus, on the street, in the market who can afford to give, and to give, and to give, and to give, and to give until the light is received.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 29

What Becomes of the Trained DANE A. CAMPBELL

“Your right, pinky finger please,” Officer Hertz asked.

First Fonse had to find the finger; then, reluctantly, he placed it on the scanner. The officer wrapped his four fingertips on one side and his thumb on the other, rotating it so that the bottom edges clearly appeared on the monitor. His touch was gentle, reminiscent of the way Fonse’s mother, Claire, touched his hands as a child, examining how well he had cut his nails or, more importantly, kept them clean.

Why yo’ fingers so damn soft, my dude? You out here on these streets, tusslin’ with these niggas but yo’ hands soft as hell? Fonse was perplexed, his gaze roving the blond strands of hair that lay on the upper limbs of the officer’s fingers. The officer’s hands behaved as if he suffered from a mild case of Essential Tremor, though Fonse knew it was a more serious condition: uneasiness.

He had been to this station before, here and there, with his homies’ mothers or their girlfriends, posting bail for mild misdemeanors, always on the other side but feeling twice as guilty as the friend that had been apprehended. None of them really broke the law, they just rammed up against it.

They’d bruise, he didn’t.

One time, when he was pulling up, he counted the parked squad cars out front while admiring the way the Chicago and United States’ flags rippled in the city’s wind. One might have thought he was entering a place where justice was upheld, not a place where a man could walk in whole and leave with just the scrapings left behind from the carving and deboning of his inner being.

Fonse once felt untouchable. Not by way of arrogance, but by divine intervention. Somehow, someway, he wasn’t in the car when Marty, his ride-or-die, was caught driving after just downing a forty-ounce from Leo’s Liquor and Grocers. It just so happened that Fonse wasn’t at Big Mike’s house over on Bishop Avenue the day it was raided and Pierce, his ace boon coon, was charged with possession—though innocent— right along with the real culprits. And it was luck the night he was dropped off at home right before the others were pulled over for cruising down 47th Street in the Buick that none of the passengers knew was stolen.

Even counting the times he had been there to rescue his guys, he was not a regular at theprecinct.

Being on this end of the counter finally inducted him into the pantheon of the rappers he hailed, all heroes with tarnished backgrounds, made saints after their persecution. But as glorifying as that felt, he was still a nigga, locked up, among the rest.

They apprehended him just steps from his front lawn, half an hour before dawn. He was traversing the alley, using a shortcut to get from the trouble he had just made. He should have done what he had done in the past: dipped through Ms. Rogers’ backyard and crept behind Buggy and Prezo’s uncle’s garage. Once the flicker of

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AUGUST 5, 2015

their LED lights faded, he’d come out and run half a block down to the side door of his house. It always worked, the nights he had done nothing wrong, just coming home from practicing at Marty’s or hanging out with Pierce. But because he always “fit the description,” it was a measure he had to take.

“Alfonso Anderson?” the officer said, fishing out Fonse’s wallet from his front pocket. “What I do, officer?” he asked, his illustrations by leech sheldon arms touching the sky.

Before Fonse could offer an alias: “Byron Reed,” the cop said to the other, “Yep, it’s him,” shining his flashlight on Fonse’s expired State ID. The officer’s badge read: Norbert. Fonse knew that much.

He insisted on keeping the flashlight shining in his face, requesting that Fonse leave his “fucking eyes open” and remain unflinchingly still. After a while he had to decide which pain he could tolerate, the rawness of his knees on the concrete or the inferno roaring in his eyes from the flashlight.

He really couldn’t focus on any particular object in the small, enclosed room where his fingerprints were being taken. His vision was still a bit blurred, posing for his mug shot photos, the flash from the camera creating shapeless sepals of the fuchsia flower (like the ones in Aunt Latoya’s backyard), floating in a blurry haze. His eyes had already been suffering from sleepless nights, burned bleak, riddled with reddened askew veins. Seeing was hurting, but he still tried getting a good look at the inside. It wasn’t the “jail” he thought he’d see.

He could still remember Adam, Pierce, Marty, and Goo, as newly released inmates, each at different times, walking out, shoulders stooped, heads dangling below their collars. Their lives dried out of them like the addicts thronging 51st Street by the second of the month, now low from their cocaine highs, pockets flipped inside out, having deposited their entire SSI checks with the boys on the corner. Just making bail, Fonse would watch as they used their fingertips to graze the welts on their wrists from the constricting metal pythons a Blue and White had chained behind them. They’d grab their plastic “possessions” bag, staring at their belts and shoelaces, possibly imagining making a noose.

The ride home would be lined with monosyllabic dialogue, punctuated with “I’m cool,” “I’m straight,” “I just ain’t tryna go back.”

From where Fonse stood, he tried to find this purgatory, this place where his boys had to have been while there, this dungeon that had chafed their pride, reducing it to fragments of manhood, this place that made them so sure that they’d never “go back.” He stood on his tippy toes, searching for a pitchfork with razor edges; a red devil, beckoning him to step forward. Nobody. Nothing.

The walls were bare, only framed city ordinances hung in no contrived or decorative fashion. He heard forms flipping, ruffling,

toppling over, being stapled and filed away while dispatch radios of varying volume chirped in his ears. No Devil. No lakes of fire. Only Officer Norbert’s deriding facial expression could be found as he left the other one, Officer Hertz, there to finish the processing.

Fonse muttered: “This corrupt system just keep failin’ me, But it never fail to be jailin’ me, My boys on the streets just straight haaaaailin’ me, But not one of dem niggas up here tryna post baaaaail for me…”

His voice was a melodic Brillo pad, coarse and barren. His neck swayed, as if to balance the bobbing of his head as he rapped the lyrics to another song he had written with Pierce and Marty.

Hertz stared at him as he lifted Fonse’s finger off of the scanner. “Niiice, who’s that, Nas or somebody?” he asked jovially, one of those few officers with whom Fonse had come in contact who took a different approach when arresting suspects. There was a time or two where Fonse and his guys were pulled over, and though they were speeding, they only received a warning. For once, they weren’t asked to get out of the car to be nearly strip-searched and insulted. There was also that time when Fonse had lost it with his mother’s then boyfriend. The officer allowed Fonse to leave her home for the night and didn’t instigate his mother or her boyfriend pressing charges. These instances were anomalous and cherished, but trusting any of them, for him, was still incomprehensible.

Hertz seemed to have taken an interest in him while on their way to the station, asking him questions as Norbert, who looked even younger than Fonse, kept his face on ice. Hertz told forced, corny jokes their entire way to the station, as if he were apologetic about having to arrest him. Even when Fonse was Mirandized, Hertz practically whispered him his rights, his face looking more annoyed than the one being arrested.

“Nawl, not Nas,” he replied, stretching his neck from side to side. “Or lemme guess, Biggie, right?”

“Nawl, this me. Me and my boys wrote it,” Fonse replied matter-of-factly, his face emotionless, featuring rusted lips that barely parted as he answered. The officer moved from beside him to the other end of the desk, examining the prints as they appeared on the monitor. Then he came back, a plastic smile developing on his face.

“Oh, that’s cool. I knew a guy that could come off the top of his head with that stuff. He was pretty damn good too. Ring finger, please.”

Fonse tried not to roll his eyes at Hertz who he felt was trying his best to play the “good cop” role. Even if he were one, the fact remained that he had arrested him. Fonse replaced his pinky with his right-hand ring finger. Hertz tended to it with caution, in the same way he had done the ones before.

“Yeah, I can freestyle too.”

“That’s it. Exactly. Freestyling. That’s incredible. Got one for me?” His face was luminescent, letting go of Fonse’s finger.

“You gon’ lemme out this joint?” Fonse joked, without a smile

or any inflection in his voice.

“Man, you’ll get an I-Bond and be outta here in a few hours. Just as long as your prints are cool. No warrants, right?”

He lifted Fonse’s ring finger off the scanner and then reached for his middle finger.

“Nawl,” Fonse sighed, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

“Yeah, you seem like a cool cat. But you gotta stay outta trouble, bro.”

Fonse sneered at him. “Cool cat”? “Bro”? This his way of makin’ me feel like he down or somethin’? he snapped inwardly.

He remembered his “training” and decided against cursing out the doughnut-eating bastard.

Around 79th Street, west of the Dan Ryan, all of the young dudes went through “training.” As more prepubescent boys were being brutally harassed by policemen, Pastor Jenkins from The First Baptist Church of Jesus Christ down on 85th and Stewart urged the mothers in the congregation to “train” their “boys.”

Jenkins would wipe sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief taken from his suit jacket and continue, “Get ’em prepared, fathers out there, and if ain’t no fathers in the house today, you mothers, all you beautiful mothers, servin’ The Lord—as both parents—gettem trained.”

“Come on!”; “Yes Gawd!”; “Amen!” women in the first pew shouted, electrified by the fervor in Jenkins’ voice. The musical director would play a few chords of the organ to add emphasis.

The call for this “training” to take place in all of the neighborhood’s homes was just one of TFBJC’s many initiatives in reaction to community issues in the late eighties and early nineties.

They got their point across through the Pastor’s explosive sermon “At the cross is where you must be, near, ain’t close enough!” the pastor demanded.

“No it ain’t!”

With the hall doors open, his voice could easily be heard, bellowing out of the speakers down to the street corners, sending inhibitions through the conscience of even the most Godless of the ’hood’s subjects: “Yo, let’s take this shit down the block, my nigga.”

85th Street, where First Baptist lived, had a row of two-flats and single-family bungalows just across the way. Two of those had boarded windows, and next to three of the most attractive houses (and even calling them such was a stretch), empty lots squatted, forsaken, filled with knee-high grass. One had a bullet-holed fence, yards of it leaning to where it touched the ground. These fields were littered with bottles, McDonald’s sandwich boxes, and brown paper and plastic bags. On both sides of the one-way, the curbs were filled with even more debris: discarded potato chip bags, beer cans, and empty cigarette boxes.

Read the rest of this excerpt from Dane Campbell’s And When Nobody Cared online at southsideweekly.com.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 31

Maxwell Street, A Chicago Portrait DAVID NEKIMKEN

Maxwell Street Originally between Maxwell and 16th, both sides of Halsted (Now part of UIC) A vast, thriving marketplace Smells of kielbasa and grilled onions (Eastern Europeans) ribs and rib tips (African Americans) and tacos, and burritos (Mexicans) Men‘s suits for all occasions, all walks of life women’s handbags, hats, the latest fashions The allure of jewelry, clothes, food, knickknacks and tools Sunday tourists curious, adventurous hunting for bargains, souvenirs Entrepreneurs from all points of the city Legitimate small businessmen trying to make a few bucks Con men fleecing us of a few bucks “Have I got a deal for you—” The mix and mingle of humanity A man with watches up his sleeve A man on the No. 8 Halsted bus with two live chickens Chicago’s very own melting pot.

Ghetto street Street lined with impoverished homes pinching pennies for survival quarantined from well-to-do neighbors limited resources, limited dreams From Jew Town, Russian Jews open-air pushcart market To African-Americans street performers of blues and gospels To Mexican immigrants ever-shrinking boundaries now Roosevelt and Des Plaines.

Unique Chicago flavor of sweet and sour.

Portraying A Dream DAVID NEKIMKEN

Imagine.

Guns Returned In dribs & drabs In a steady stream As swift-moving rapids As a thundering waterfall, By homeowners, shopkeepers, Teachers, doctors, funeral directors By students, athletes, hunters, gangbangers, From closets, desk drawers, concealed holsters Into an ever-expanding landfill, ever-rising scrapheap Adorned with full and half-empty ammunition magazines, Weighing heavily atop hallowed and sacred ground below Amplifying hideous, bloodletting, horrific screams, mutilated bodies Broken-hearted families, grief-stricken friends, outraged communities Shattered creative lives, shattered lifetime dreams, scattered Divine light.

Imagine.

Atop this mountain Of fear and wounded pride Stands an angelic figure in full halo Radiating from the inside out: love, peace and joy With her ever-present, irrepressible, from ear-to-ear-wide smile, Hadiya Zaymara Pendleton.

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AUGUST 5, 2015

Jazz Hops a Railcar to Chicago DAN “SULLY” SULLIVAN

Jazz was born with piano hands under an Iberville street lamp parented by the quick brass of horns. Jazz was a southern child and jazz was black. Storyville was a house of worship, twirling high on New Orleans ivory until that good red turned navy in the daylight. When those doors shut, Jazz cracked his keys and boogie-woogied like an upriver shuffle down Perdido Street to the slick-kick shotgun of Chicago. He turned the right kind of blue on Canal, then slipped slow to the Apex on Calumet. The keys built back this house music, dancing like fingers across a South Side clarinet. He sounded black

DuSable Remembers His Wife, Kittihawa

as Bronzeville, as the Pekin Temple, as something I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say, as the Duke at Quinn Chapel, black as a belt in a red summer. Jazz was never a rag-tag second hand or a sharecropper’s blues; He was riot burning black as a coalminer callous, as a river mouth that glides like Metropolis ink. Jazz didn’t float to Chicago on sheet music. Mississippi river boats

DAN “SULLY” SULLIVAN

couldn’t hold those notes. It was the 12th street station that railroaded his song too close to home for those Irish boys.

We know you knew Tom Brown Jazz, but we never wanted

There is a way to say this in French: The ceremony was a prairie lullaby.

you to settle in slow to the stroll. We wanted you to take the Midway, let the fight in you rise like a smokestack sky, not head west to pinstripe a Cicero saloon. You were a defender, Jazz. You should’ve known

Yes, She was my answer.

I could tallgrass all night. What I did: lap my heartrend

when you saw Bud Freeman ear-hustling in back of a juke joint or saw a gin glass in Beiderbecke’s fist that you might look ghost now: turned white as a sheet, as a whippersnapper on Halsted Street,

away, love the sun on the lake of her, fleet of foot. She homed a heartland for me.

as a swing-step, as Eliot Ness in his Sunday’s best. We’ve seen you in that town car, trotting back and forth from Dixieland, whistling at uptown girls, playing by the rules you tried to rewrite you

Maybe it was New Orleans that led me Mississippi nigh toward this Deer Spirit but My God, she could Earth like only a Woman could. Yes, together

tried to break you improvised. But we know. We always have known that you’re a policy king, a high hat on a Raceman in Dreamland.

We know the speakeasy still speaks Creole. We know

we manned the dirt into statues, praised the land for its song.

how many tongues you have, how you can make us dance all night.

We know you came to Chicago to work it, Jazz, we remember where you came from and exactly who you’ve always been.

We bickered over how to greet the neighbors. She would learn to hate me for my willingness to stay.

The fire would come julia mellen

but remember: there was a time when she welcomed me here.

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 33

Ode to the Brothas & Sistas CLAUDE ROBERT HILL, IV

(Alpha Derailed) We don't go far to drain the blood from the Ghetto soul.

The innocent a mere footnote instead of a mighty chorus of 'Go!' We have forgotten the ghosts of a dreamer's ambitions.

To go through imagination's necessity for freedoms overdue.

Struggles hung on negro spirituals past.

The Holy instinct to bring about a rebuttal of segregation's doubts.

Broken glass mangled inside out in closeted dreams.

Worn out feets stinking and deform on the road of rebirth.

I told ya that those negroes would find... The Dreams' gates opened!

The brightest moment melted in ancient pigment's intellectual thrust.

I'se a man full of time scrapping and unearthing biases' crimes.

What have I done to my future's dream.

I drove by, conquered, and creamed the competition. I'se now rich heir to a land that was never mine.

Filled with life less brothas and sistas that never was.

(A Coward's Bullets) I've broke the civil, the rights, and the hood.

The driving forces of a people's rolling brook.

Fathers and Mothers grieving for the unrooted seeds of an ancient great peoples.

The shadows of creation eulogizes during the wake of a colored, a nigger, a black and an African American's ascent into what?

Who? and why the hell? This world collapses into a repressive state mourning the descendants of the world's beginnings.

The Nile River has dried up in contempt.

Jailing the emotions of historic events.

Answer me, you, African American youths determined to silence the dreams of billions who died.

Who invented, ruled and influenced time herself.

Answer me for now I am awake.

It's time to put you over my knee.

And whip that ass with historic pride.

Since you failed to answer me with your empty mouths and imprisoned brains.

The answer I proclaim to you will sting this day.

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AUGUST 5, 2015

Sweet, Sweet Daddy SOPHIE KENNEDY

julia mellen

I

’m going to tell you a story. Come on down. Gather around. How about it? This is tale of a girl gone wild and a lover gone lovin’. Of a cat on the prowl and a kitten on the loose. Of a man in the gutter soakin’ in the stink of his own despair. And of a child, a blessed-blue-eyed-angelgift-from-God of a child. What do you think? How about it?

Call me a liar. Call me a cheat. What of it?

Remember the man with his beard gone cracked stringy with the penance for his great big sins, wrapped in a yellow blanket stained with the last of his dignity oozing from his open sores. He rules his 55th Street realm with his crooked paper crown balanced upon his weary head. The

rain bangs down around his windy kingdom yet he remains stoic atop his throne. Only to pass his secret messages does the man with his beard gone cracked descend into the streets, posting his letters to the sewer at dusk each day, letters to a lost love or a call to arms, it’s tough to know, Blessed be this King, most high, or high enough.

Remember the boy with eyes burned dark from the tears of heartbreak, buried in the pain of his body, watching his muscles grow larger and his heart get smaller. He pours himself out into cups on the table, surrounded by lovers and loves and people who knew him, only so well as to know they couldn’t ever, really. Gone to the confessional at an early age, a demon haunts him, the one that love becomes when we find the holes it leaves in its wake. Oh, was this boy full of holes. This boy with his eyes burned dark strikes through flesh like matches on an electric night, for every match, another hole. At his feet full of holes lies a pile of ash. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, this confession has been a long time comin’.

Remember the girl with cheeks flushed pink, then red, blue, purple, with love and pain, her halo hanging on only by a thread, kneeling in prayer to a God whose name she’ll never know. There she does her penance for the wickedness of her vile youth, for there’s nothing like a bottle to soften the sting of too much glass. Oh that sweet, that damned sweet elixir. The taste lingers long after the midnight hours have gone, in the oil of her hair and the grime on her teeth. The girl with cheeks flushed pink can’t remember how the liturgy goes, just the up and down and on her knees rhythm of ridding her body of her mother’s gift of guilt and shame. Where is Mary’s grace now, we wonder?

Remember the three-legged dog lying dead in the road, shot down, kicked down, put down by the polite young man who keeps his fly unzipped. Here’s an honest man, keeps his money in a coffee can and his Bible on the kitchen table. Prays Hail Marys in the bed at night with his head under the covers, he screws away his sorrow for the women he loved because he couldn’t, can’t, remember what there was to love in himself. The three-legged dog, a grinning reminder of man’s broken creed with God, won’t be put down by any man’s carelessness or any other’s cruelty. But the polite young man will make a ghost of him yet.

Thy kingdom comes whether we like it or not, so why not now?

Remember now the sweet Daddy with the worn out knees and the watch that no longer ticks, smiling from some place where he’s never known failure. Always in his ears the quiet echo of the ghosts of sins said and done. But it’s the undone ones that haunt him deepest. He hears the rattle of the fragile bones of his daughters come and gone in the damp morning air sticky with the promise of God-knows-what.

Such a sweet daddy with his smile tied on tight prays for mercy, but the poor box is small—no room for such sick hopeless prayers.

So goes our blue-eyed, three-legged, cheeks-flushed-pink, eyesburned-dark, beard-gone-cracked sweet, sweet Daddy. O. Where he’s gone, nobody knows.

Now I’ve told my tales, and I’ve got some penance to do for all these laughing lies I’ve spun.

Do you renounce Satan? I do. And all his works? Most of them.

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 35

Shooting an Innocent (for Nicholas V. )

O.A. FRASER

The white child With the black friend Sits crying tonight Under the halogen light; His bat and his ball His bike in the hall His bruise from an angry fight; He’d barter them quick He’d barter them all To change his distressing sight;

julia mellen

Anna Has a Basil O.A. FRASER

Anna has a basil turning brown, in the nicest pot:

dying a little more when she dries it out: spotting, and hanging to one side

a house, like her mother’s house.

in the pretty pink pot, a house like her mother’s house;

The little thing started dying the day she put it there, away from the plastic tray of green, tender leaves in the produce section.

And now it doesn’t take her water very well, losing a leaf each time she wets the soil;

36 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

on the window sill in the kitchen, where the cat never comes; refusing to fight on, like her mother, surrendering her life to the nicest house where nothing ever grew, but everything always looked shiny, and new.

AUGUST 5, 2015

The boys tall and cool The girls missing school These were the friends he made first.

They played well at pool They all played the fool, Now, one rode in a hearse.

And the questions Of how and why and when He never thought until then, All stuck in his head With the boy who lay dead, And life was now sad at ten.

And the single mother Of the single child Was once herself Just running wild In afternoons and evening tide In weather wet and weather mild, Much like the boy she sits beside And comforts, knowing His innocence has died.

And the father She did not know, And the boy’s father Who did not go To the funeral of his friend, Cemented the bond Of the single mother, and the single son.

And the tears Which were not shed For his father, living Nor her father, dead Sprinkled the memory Of the black boy, instead.

Black Hashtags MACK JULION

It’s hard to live when your name could be the next hashtag.

Trash bags lynching black bodies As if black people belong in trash cans Last stand. No lying.

All truth. No lying.

No outrage for black life. I’m no lion.

But I am a king Painful hearing Sandra scream Even when we race to the top Another black life stopped Another racist cop Racial profiling during a traffic stop Stopped for no reason Three days later they found her not breathing Suicide. I don't believe it.

Try to remain peaceful But in 2015, they're still lynching black people.

They can hang the dreamers but can't stop the dream Tried to bury us but didn't realize we're seeds So when they put us in the ground We grew tall as trees So call the guards when we riot Eric Garner in Staten Island We fight back like Ali and Tyson We're nonv violent and compliant But it's hard when they traded in the hoods For badges and the horses for sirens Took down the Cconfederate But racism still hangs like the noose they hung Sandra with Letting my life reflect the words that Ssandy speaks I'm Malcolm by any means I'm Martin in jeans I'm Che with naps Love wins in America when we legalize black.

AUGUST 5, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 37

Contributors

Nicole Bond is a writer and performance poet, is a member of the Chicago Slamworks House Ensemble, and a winner of their LitMash multi genre literary slam competition. Her work has been featured on WBEZ, in the Neighborhood Writing Alliance Journal of Ordinary Thought, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She is a gentrified refugee from Hyde Park now in South Shore.

Elaine Hegwood Bowen, MSJ has covered both Chicago’s urban and suburban communities, writing for the Chicago Crusader since 1994 and previously writing for The Doings Newspapers. She grew up in Englewood, has been living in Bronzeville since 2004, and has taught at City Colleges of Chicago and Roosevelt University.

Elbert Tavon Briggs currently collaborates with the Randolph Street Brown Bag Poets and Poets & Patrons. His work has been published in the Northeastern Illinois SEEDS Literary & Visual Arts Journal and The New Verse News.

Dane A. Campbell is a high school English and drama teacher in Chicago whose works have appeared in The Garland Court Review, The Black Magnolias Literary Journal, and the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography All-Star Anthology. He has just completed a novel, And When Nobody Cared, from which "What Becomes of the Trained" was excerpted.

Mari Cohen wrote her first poem, about jack-o’-lanterns, at the age of five and has been trying to live up to that debut ever since. She has won awards for her poetry from Michigan State University and Albion College, and has been published in The Albion Review, The Mochila Review, Sliced Bread, and others.

She also writes and edits for the South Side Weekly.

Aerin Cooper wasn't born. She arose from sea foam of the Gulf Coast and never looked back. She lives for language, sound, and, most importantly, how both influence life and the conscious world. She is a senior at Columbia College, majoring in poetry.

Paul Dailing is a freelance journalist and creator of 1,001 Chicago Afternoons,which was a winner of a Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism. Read more at 1001chicago.com.

Amelia Dmowska is a staff writer for the South Side Weekly. She also runs ArtShould, a student organization that provides free after-school art classes at local schools, and co-directs StoryArts Summer Camp, a free summer program that encourages students to share stories through different artistic mediums.

Stephen English is a short story author and humorist. He is a graduate of Kent State University and has done graduate work at Northeastern and Columbia College, Chicago. He and his husband, Ryan, live in Beverly and own The Blossom Boys, a floral design studio and Fair Trade crafts gallery.

O.A. Fraser lives in Hyde Park. He is a member of Chicago's oldest writing group and often hosts multi-genre salons in his home or garden.

Corey Hall is the editor and publisher of Expressions from Englewood, a journal that features the best personal essays, poetry, fiction, and "papers of research" from people living, working, and/or going to school in the Englewood community.

Claude Robert Hill, IV has been writing poetry since he was nine years old.

Most recently, he published a poetry and short stories digital book, entitled I am the Namaste Child on Amazon. He is a resident of Auburn Gresham.

Mack Julion is a Chicago native, a teacher, and a justice advocate. He is a 38 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

AUGUST 5, 2015

spoken word activist who uses his voice to bring attention to injustices in our community, city and country. He also works with the youth ministry at the Faith Community of Saint Sabina.

Sophie Kennedy is a writer and performer. Originally from Memphis, she lives with her yellow lab, Linus, in Hyde Park, where she is a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago.

Tony Lindsay’s latest work is a collection of short stories titles, Almost Grown.

He has an MFA from Chicago State University.

Dakota Loesch is a Chicagoan and an interdisciplinary artist. He is a co-founder of Artful Enough Pictures, the author of You Are an Idiot, and a songwriter for the traveling rock outfit Animal City. His latest release is a collection of twenty-seven poems entitled Beer Money.

Andrew Lovdahl is a six-year South Sider. He likes the strange remains of other centuries, working at The Plant, and memorizing the grid plan of Chicago for no particular reason.

Khaleelah D. Muhammad, J.D. is a South Side native, community organizer, wife, and mother of three. She enjoys reading to children and writing. She runs Stringweavers, a crochet and knitting program at Thurgood Marshall Library.

Jack Murphy lives in Chicago.

David Nekimken lives in a housing co-op in Hyde Park of twenty adults and two children. He has had poems published in the Journal of Ordinary Thought and the Journal of Modern Poetry.

Diane O'Neill is a lifelong Chicagoan. Her career has focused on two passions: creative writing and disability rights. She works as a curriculum designer and writer, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing with distinction from National University and a BA in Writing/English with honors from Columbia College. Five of her essays have been published, including one as an op-ed in the Tribune and "My Son's Race" in last year's Lit Issue.

Vincente “SubVersive” Perez is a poet, activist, and musician who focuses on the lived experience of race in America through several mediums. He is currently writing and producing a print and audio chapbook, B(lack)NESS & LATINI(dad), which examines Black and Latinx experiences through the lenses of hip-hop, spoken word, and narrative to challenge the idea that we live distinct political, social, and economic lives.

Mike Pocius is a lifetime South Sider, street photographer, and occasional art organizer.

Dmitry Samarov paints and writes in Chicago. He has exhibited his work in all manner of bars, coffee shops, libraries, and even the odd gallery (when he's really hard up). He is the author of the illustrated work memoirs Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Where To? A Hack Memoir (Curbside Splendor, 2014). He no longer drives a cab.

Hannah Shea studies English at the University of Chicago. Her preferred place to write poems is in her cubicle at the UofC Press, and her preferred job is behind the counter at Grounds of Being Coffee Shop.

Dan “Sully” Sullivan is a Chicago native and founder of the Urban Sandbox, a youth-focused poetry series in Logan Square. His first collection of poems, The Blue Line Home, is now available from EM-Press.

Crossword

Inspired by the works of Gwendolyn Brooks JOE LOTHAN

Across 1. Tree juice 4. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt 9. Suffix with land or sea 14. Green org.

15. ____-Grain 16. City of Light 17. Poem line paired with “We thin gin” 19. Blow one’s top 20. __ hole in (corrodes) 21. __ Mistake (blew it) 23. Spell-off 24. Dull-colored 25. Poem line paired with “We strike straight” 27. Org. of interest to Edward Snowden 29. Chicago-to-Tampa dir.

30. “You’ve got mail” company 33. A small angle 37. New York City’s ____ Galerie 41. South Side poet and author of 53-across 45. A deadly sin 46. Bicker 47. Badminton barrier 48. Class of ’15 in 2015, e.g., abbr.

51. TV screen choice, abbr.

53. Poem title and line paired with “We left school” 59. Island of Napoleon’s exile 63. Ambient music composer Brian 64. Cattle identifier 65. Like much testimony 66. Wing it 68. Poem line paired with “We jazz june” 70. Frankie of the Four Seasons 71. Forever, in verse 72. Rx watchdog org.

73. Ends of squids?

74. Uncool set 75. Replies at sea

Down 1. Put in stitches 2. “...in ____ tree” 3. Penne, e.g.

4. Sicilian city 5. Shoveled 6. “Who’s there?” response 7. Error’s partner 8. Karma believer 9. Pipes up 10. Auto 11. One of the Dutch Antilles 12. Lab tube 13. Lauder of cosmetics 18. Library ID 22. Busy hosp. areas 25. Texas city of Baylor University 26. Jay formerly of “The Tonight Show” 28. Bummed 30. Ice or Bronze follower 31. Have 32. “My name is Asher ____” 34. Suffix with form or spat 35. Norse god of war 36. Part of E.S.L., abbr.

38. Many years 39. Luau instrument, for short 40. Ballpark fig.

42. Wall Street letters 43. Symbol of 42-down 44. VCR button 49. Torah readers 50. Camera type, briefly 52. Mountain ____ (soft drinks) 53. Use a loom 54. “____ a Man” (Calder Willingham novel and play) 55. Fancy car, informally 56. Imitated a crow 57. “You’re ____ talk!”

58. Stranger 60. Bath sponge 61. Adrien of “The Pianist” 62. Kendrick and Paquin 65. Upper house members, abbr.

67. ____-de-France 69. Annoy

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