CITY LIFE

a few notes. So we go and look, and the little people are just spinning.” Just Christina saying hi.

Wagner credits Czarnowski’s story as a turning point in his paranormal journey. The further he dives into the show, the more he opens himself up to new beliefs. Now, he records the show with skeptics in mind. “There’s a di erence between being open-minded and believing everything you hear,” he said. “But being skeptical is not something to be proud of. It implies writing something off before even learning about it.”

Chicago historian and author Adam Selzer, who runs tours under the Mysterious Chicago moniker, says that Chicago is no more haunted than any other city. Instead, the ghost stories become a record of the city’s history. “We have ghosts from the Pullman Riots. We have ghosts from the Eastland Disaster. We have ghosts from the Great Chicago Fire,” he said. “In a lot of cases, that’s just how the history stories survive. After the history itself fades away, people remain interested in the ghosts of it.”

In fact, Wagner’s very first experience with the paranormal ties into one of Chicagoland’s famous hauntings. When he was in high school, a teacher claimed to have been in attendance when a famous ghost photograph was taken at Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in Midlothian. In the photo, a pale figure of a woman perches on a headstone. The people in attendance claim that no one was sitting there when the camera shutter clicked. The story fascinated Wagner. In fact, that same teacher fi rst told him about the haunting of the Wheaton Grand.

So what’s next for Otherworld ? As the show expands, Wagner has plans for longer, stranger, more intense stories. He has a backlog of interviews from Chicagoland. He’d love to plan more multiepisode arcs and maybe even start reporting in person for certain stories. And he’d like to keep learning about things that, up until recently, he wouldn’t have believed. “There’s no shortage of these stories,” Wagner said. “As I put out better episodes, people continue to come out of the woodwork and tell me things that I never thought I’d be hearing.” v a praise poem for Sukihana after Sukihana’s ‘Cornbread TV’ Interview

By E’mon Lauren

tiger under the eye. a tribal blaze, for all chocolate girls in the heat of melt. they want us, stable saterns, to a galaxy we would never return to. she holds us, accountable to all we deserve to be. drop gems out the coochie. and let that be enough. don’t let my mouth open. it’s stuffed with crab and lobster. chicken cauliflower when the crows come home to roost. i boost a n*gga up, dafuq? i can be Suki. i can be whoever i wanna be, da fuq. i’m exclusive. throw up on the last person i didn’t wanna become. the n*ggas i date could’ve been something more than ordinary people. don’t disgrace me because i’ve been a Delilah they’ve paid for. some n*gga, got his foot kissed before, and didn’t deserve the offer. now it’s coins up. tithes for titties. don’t play with who you think i don’t know i is. a national treasure. an over deserted country’s last chance at wet. we that good good. the type n*ggas love.

E’mon Lauren is a blk queer Scorpio, from the Wes and Souf side of Chicago, whose work unpacks her coined philosophy of “hood-womanism”. She was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. She has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. She is the host of her podcast “The RealHoodwives of Chicago, and her first chapbook of poems, COMMANDO, was published by Haymarket Books, Fall of 2017.

Poem curated by Chima “Naira” Ikoro. Naira is an interdisciplinary writer from the South Side of Chicago. She is a Columbia College Chicago alum, a teaching artist at Young Chicago Authors, and South Side Weekly’s Community Builder. Alongside her friends, Naira co-founded Blck Rising, a mutual aid abolitionist collective created in direct response to the ongoing pandemic and 2020 uprisings.

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