August 1, 2014 | The Lit Issue

AUGUST 1, 2014

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A R T S , C U LT U R E , A N D P O L I T I C S

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S O U T H S I D E W E E K LY. C O M

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FREE

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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south side weekly

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we almost took a break for the summer, but we wanted you to read these. welcome to...

Poetry Fiction red’s excuse

The South Side Weekly is a newsprint magazine based out of the University of Chicago, for and about the South Side. The Weekly is distributed across the South Side each Wednesday of the academic year and in occasional special summer issues.

In fall 2013, the Weekly reformed itself as an independent, student-directed organization. Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-chief Bea Malsky Nonfiction Editor Meaghan Murphy Poetry Editor John Gamino Fiction Editor Spencer Mcavoy Contributing Editors

Jake Bittle, Harrison Smith

5706 S. University Ave. Reynolds Club 018 Chicago, IL 60637 SouthSideWeekly.com Send tips, comments, or questions to: editor@southsideweekly.com For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 advertising@southsideweekly

I thought I was dreaming it, so I let the phone ring through.

how to express mixed emotions

a review of paper lantern

on a standardized test

Already, Dybek has set forth his method of discursive narrative: moving laterally, as one scene dissolves into another.

when the phone rings, and your little cousin’s voice asks why you talk white, try not to answer. keith wilson...7

andrew lovdahl...5

spokane when life gives you oranges

Even a lion can get lost in the jungle, and soon Bankroll found himself stuck in the madness. annesti walker...8

What were you doing twenty-four hours after you were born?

“What do you think about that?”

“It’s silver,” she said. jack murphy...12

He took that memory to his grave and now there’s only mine. rafael franco...17

paul dailing...10

next part is a clan, a wild bunch on the outskirts of civil. nate marshall...16

“Shakespeare added hundreds of words to the English language just by doing stuff like that. And that’s the same shit Chief Keef does.” maira khwaja...13

the ballroom artists’

And the lull of the Stevenson, beckoning you to stilted dreams at night. susan hogan...19

an interview with kimberly dixon-mays

“The humor comes from this discomfort leaking out and undercutting the speaker’s other fawning words.” rachel hyman...22

lovesong

sue

The man’s got this look like he wants to tell the kid to put that thing away, to look him in the eye, to have fun goddammit. jack murphy...18

an ulcer glows slowly, like amber in this house. keith wilson...26

a profile of blue balliett

“For kids,” she says, “pattern recognition is just natural.” emily lipstein...24

chicago poems the lion

She turned bright red. “ You should talk, six-toes!” It was true: he did have six toes. linus recht...20

A tree with branches that expand out With a trunk made of steel, these are ways Chicago is imagined. students from st. thomas the apostle school...29

hyde park walking tour

Hyde Park, ladies and gentlemen: our oasis in an oasis! But bits of sand always fly in. kimberly dixon-mays...23

this war

It will put the clumsy, old ones to shame. o.a. fraser...30

juggling

communion

The fireballs leapt from his asbestos hands over and over.

Jesus had his bread and wine but I have your smile

luis alejandro ordóñez

Cover art by Alice Bucknell alicebucknell.com Lettering by Nicholas Cassleman

the spirit we have here

The men just accumulate, mostly old, with a few young acolytes drawn by the sound.

an interview with nate marshall

commune + poem for tice dusk

jamison pfeifer...4

hannah o’grady...11 propose

callie

Nonfiction

...25

h.b. kamau...32

stop and frisk

fish sauce

“Randy, it is too early for all that truth this morning.”

I tell her how my fingers always stink of fish

tony lindsay...37

h.b. kamau...33

downtown brown

He raised his children in the cab, lining them up in the front seat to keep them safe when he couldn’t be home. paul dailing...27 my son’s race

At the Y last week, updating my single membership to a family one, I saw my beige hand writing the word black for my son’s race. diane o’neill...31

a review of painting with fire

Using her writing as an outlet, Jensen crafted a fictional explanation where no real answers existed. wednesday quansah...35

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review

Consumed by Flames Stuart Dybek’s Paper Lantern jamison pfeifer

“E

arly on, Mariel told me she wasn’t one to dwell on the past,” discloses the narrator of “Oceanic,” speaking about a formative romance, though it’s later understood that she harbors a good reason not to. Yet the stories of Paper Lantern—one of two recently released short story collections (the other being Ecstatic Cahoots) from Chicago-born writer Stuart Dybek—tend to do just that: dwell on the bygone lives and loves of its stifled characters.

The nine stories that comprise this collection reflect on the mostly ephemeral romances of its characters—pieced together in Dybek’s wandering fashion—drawing from the unsystematic memories of the narrators. In “Four Deuces” a Polish-American couple, by some good (and eventually doomed) fortune, come to own a bar in Pilsen.

Then there’s the Chicago case-worker in “Seiche” who has an affair with his client, a single-mother of a terminally ill child, and his younger self, a college student who dates a Rumi-quoting Persian girl. In “Waiting,” a couple spend their days together in a lakeside cottage in Michigan.

Paper Lantern, which for the most part is rooted in Chicago and the surrounding Midwest, bears a somewhat mawkish subtitle—“Love Stories”— and while it’s true that the collection concerns the mostly failed or former loves of its characters, the subtitle seems too simple a descriptor for these varied and elegant stories, which could be read individually, and that is for the best.

If love is the intended theme of Paper Lantern, then memory, as it discursively unfolds, is Dybek’s modus operandi. In “Oceanic,” one of the best stories in the book, a military academy student (nicknamed “Byron”) dates a girl, Mariel, whose fixation on a stranded umbrella reveals a haunting past. The story unfolds in nine numbered sections, becoming increasingly surreal and

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dreamlike, before Dybek bookends the story with a seemingly cursory prose poem that actually serves as a gentle refrain to the story’s thematic arc. Taken as a whole, the effect is strangely unsettling.

Dybek, who is also a poet, has a knack for such sensual, dreamlike, and, at times, surreal imagery—Paper Lantern takes its epigraph from Keat’s “Ode On a Grecian Urn.” But Dybek is also refreshingly literate in his writing (though not hyper-literate). There’s a first-person discussion of Hemingway and a girlfriend defends her love of Dawn Powell, which clues us to her character’s growing misgivings. “Waiting,” involves a lengthier account of the concept of waiting in literature, from Kafka to Joyce. For the most part, these discussions are woven successfully into the dramatic arc of the stories they inhabit, speaking more to the organic idiosyncrasies of these stories than anything else. These stories are tonally and narratively diverse enough to never feel repetitious, mostly thanks to Dybek’s affecting prose, through which these varied and elegant stories reach occasional moments of gorgeous delirium (like in “Oceanic”) or staid disclosure (“Waiting”).

With any of these stories, one would be hard-pressed to draw a linear line from beginning to end. Instead, Dybek moves—metastasizes, really— from one scene to another. These stories choose their own structures. Characters and lovers fade in and out of view, while Dybek interpolates scenes of distant memories within the larger threads of his characters’ lives.

Take the first story “Tosca” for example, which begins with a peremptory “Ready! Aim!”—halting just shy of the final command in a militaristic execution sound-off. Here, Dybek, in cinematic fashion, suspends the scene, and enters the thoughts of the armed soldiers, considering the “phantasmal”

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woman who appears between them and the man they are about to execute.

From this suspended scene of execution, Dybek takes us to a different scene: of a man and woman, lovers, in bed in a room adjacent to Chicago’s El tracks. What follows is a winding tale of peripherally connected love stories, friendships, and dramaturgy. Dybek returns at last to the execution scene, which appears to be taken straight from a Puccini opera. Already, Dybek has set forth his method of discursive narrative: moving laterally, as one scene dissolves into another.

Not every story in Dybek’s collection is equally successful, though.

“Four Deuces” and “The Caller” lose their direction slightly, at times reading more like series of imagistic scenes, but failing to amount to anything more than that. When the woman of “Four Deuces” finishes recounting the tale of how she and her husband came to own a bar and the subsequent disintegration of their relationship, the emotional resonance that Dybek is reaching towards isn’t fully earned. Still, those are slight glitches.

In the title story, which was first printed in The New Yorker in 1995 and republished the following year in the anthology Best American Short Stories 1996, a group of scientists take a break from building a time machine—a fitting invention in Dybek’s universe—to eat dinner at a former-laundromat Chinese Restaurant. When they return to their building, they find it consumed in flames (thanks to the Bunsen burner they failed to turn off ). The image of the undulating flames brings the narrator to recall an affair he once had with a married woman, and the road trip they took to Chicago together.

But what comes of the romance in “Paper Lantern,” or in the other stories? It’s never fully clear. Dybek feels no need to overwhelm us with detail or story, nor is there a traditional sense

Stuart Dybek, Paper Lantern.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

224 pages. of resolution. Long after the relationship in “Paper Lantern” comes to its logical close, the narrator reveals that the woman asked him what came of the photographs he took of her on that Chicago trip. He lies to her and tells her he burned them, when actually he kept them hidden in an envelope, finding some sense of assurance in their preservation. But this image is immediately undermined when Dybek returns to the scene of the fire from the beginning, in which he describes an image of a red paper lantern as being consumed in the flames: “a paper lantern that once seemed fragile, almost delicate, but now obliterates the very time and space it once illuminated.” Even the most portent memories, the narrator observes, are only fleeting. Why else would he be building a time machine?

fiction

Red’s Excuse andrew lovdahl

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y friend Red was supposed to meet me the other night at the Auditorium Theatre, but in the end she never showed up, and I had to see Belle and Sebastian by myself. I called her after the opening act, and then again when I left, but she was out of range each time. If it was anybody but Red, I would have been worried. I finally heard from her at about two o’clock in the morning. I thought I was dreaming it, so I let the phone ring through. In the morning I read the text she had sent instead. This

jamie hibdon

is what she had to say for herself.

“I really was on my way. I was taking my bike up the lakefront for a change & got off at 31st. I was waiting at the light there, at the overpass, with the onramps & offramps & such.

While I was sitting there I realized one of the roads at that corner isn’t a ramp at all, just a street that comes down from the north and happens to end. I’d never seen it on a map before.

“First it just took me along LSD, and under the Stevenson, and then I realized it was headed into McCormick place. But there wasn’t any way to turn off, so I kept going, down into the dark. There were loading docks & drainpipes & tour buses. There was nobody around at all. It got colder & colder. I followed a sign for taxicabs cause I figured it would bring me out to the front on King Drive. But the road kept getting skinnier & darker.

I couldn’t see the pavement but it felt incredibly smooth, like pressed air. At one point I heard train whistles. I kept looking behind me, hoping somebody would be coming to tell me off and turn me around. Finally I was in this giant cavern. Maybe it only looked big because there was shiny water all over the floor and I saw everything twice. But it really was like being inside a hollow mountain.

“In one corner they had piled up a bunch of roadblocks, in the other there was a Coke machine, & in the other, a single Archer night bus, the one that goes all the way to the airport. I got closer and saw it was a hunk of rust by now, covered in cobwebs. It must have been there for ages. & this is the weird part—Jesus was in the driver’s seat, sucking on a coffee, looking pretty burnt-out. I pulled up alongside him, real casual, pretending to fix my brakes.

I was hoping he’d start the conversation. He gave me a cross look & said, ‘This is just like the start of a joke, right?’ & then he closed the door in my face.”

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fiction

El llanto del tigre

The Cry of the Tiger

stanislaw jaroszek

translated by rachel schastok

“¿Por qué tengo un estómago tan pequeño?”, lloró el tigre al ver los ojos de la muerte, el antílope lloró también.

“Why do I have such a small stomach?” cried the tiger upon seeing death’s eyes. The antelope cried too.

Eso se le ocurrió al profesor Gucci la noche que no pudo dormir y su imaginación vagabundeaba por los desiertos de África. De un momento a otro se sintió tigre y antílope al mismo tiempo.

Sintió sus dientes devorando su propia carne. El dolor se mezclaba con el sabor de la sangre. La agonía fue un triunfo lo mismo que el devorar la presa. En un instante vio los ojos de la muerte con los ojos de la muerte: se conoció a sí mismo y despertó gritando:

This came to Professor Gucci the night when he couldn’t sleep and his imagination wandered the deserts of Africa. From one moment to the next he felt like a tiger and an antelope at the same time. He felt his teeth devouring his own flesh.

The pain mixed with the taste of blood. The agony was a triumph just like devouring prey. All at once he saw the eyes of death with the eyes of death: he faced himself and woke up screaming:

–¡No quiero ser antílope ni tampoco un tigre!

–¿Qué te pasa viejo? ¿Por qué gritas?

La esposa le pareció la dueña del circo; y él, sus dos animales. Ella intentaba detenerlos, pero ya fue demasiado tarde. Estaban libres en el silencio del desierto. El tigre-antílope solo, solito, cubierto por la noche, con los ojos cerrados, escondido del brillo de la luna. Lo venció el cansancio y se hundió en un sueño profundo y soñó de nuevo: –¿Cuántos ojos tienes?

–Cuatro.

–¿Cuántas patas?

–Ocho.

–¿Esta señora es tu esposa?

–No, es la dueña del circo.

–¿Dónde vives?

–En el desierto, donde canta el viento y duerme la noche. Allá vivo, acá solamente sueño.

“I don’t want to be an antelope or a tiger!”

“What is it, old man? Why are you screaming?”

His wife was the circus ringmaster, and he, her two animals. She tried to tame them, but it was too late. They were free in the silence of the desert. The tiger-antelope all alone in the night, its eyes closed, hidden from the moonlight. Fatigue overtook him and he sunk into a dream again: “How many eyes do you have?”

“Four.”

“How many feet?”

“Eight.”

“Is this woman your wife?”

“No, she’s the ringmaster.”

“Where do you live?”

“In the desert, where the wind sings and the night sleeps. That’s where I live. Here, I just dream.”

Originally published in Contratiempo, a Chicago-based Spanish-language literary journal.

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poetry

How to Express Mixed Emotions on a Standardized Test keith wilson

Brace yourself on your number 2 pencil.

Bubble in your name, your address and quantitate yourself.

Make a complete Stop at the heritage box.

Be careful, It might be labeled ‘Race,’ or ‘Ethnic Origin.’

Don’t bubble in ‘White.’

Don’t bubble in ‘African-American.’

And don’t bubble in ‘Other.’

Because neither of your parents is an Other.

When strangers group together try not to notice the pale and dark roads form that you don’t quite fit on.

Try not to endear yourself to your mother’s nephews more than your father’s. and when the phone rings, and your little cousin’s voice asks why you talk white, try not to answer.

If on your way home someone asks you where you’re from, feign ignorance, and answer ‘California.’

When they follow with ‘Where are your parents from?’ answer ‘New Jersey,’ or ‘Ohio,’ And just keep moving.

Don’t admit that when a stranger calls you ‘Dirty Mexican’ or ‘Sand Nigger’ what really upsets you is that they can’t tell which racist name to call you.

amber sollenberger

Just keep moving.

You’ll get to the space between Jersey and Ohio eventually, and you don’t want to miss a problem this early in the test

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fiction

When Life Gives You Oranges annesti walker

T

his is the story of graduated gang member Antonio Powell—but call him Bankroll if you see him in the streets—and remember you never heard anything from Annesti. Everybody has rough times, so Antonio doesn’t really fuss about when life gives him oranges. Instead, he thinks, “How am I supposed to make lemonade?”

Living with Mama use to be cool when Antonio was still in school. But after seventh or eighth grade, hanging out with friends soon turned into late nights. Late nights turned into not coming home, which turned into growing up, which turned into becoming a grown man. Soon, the innocent Antonio became the go-getter Bankroll. On his way home one night he ran into his uncles, Wuga and Black.

They were just standing on the corner.

The two looked as if they weren’t even thinking at all. Their backs leaned on the brick wall of the liquor store, and their faces turned toward each other as they had a conversation.

“Hey Uncle B. ‘Sup Uncle Wuga,” Antonio said to them.

“Hey nephew! Stay in school dude,” Uncle Wuga said.

Antonio ignored the statement.

He wanted to be like his uncle. Something about them standing there was cool to Antonio. It seemed like they had no worries, and he felt like he needed some of that action.

Soon, he graduated from middle school and then he really changed. He doesn’t even remember if he went to high school or not. He just knows he got into the street game quickly. When he first started standing on the corner, it seemed as if there were fewer drugs, less violence, and not so much gangbanging. “If I had nothing, I had my bloods,” Antonio said. It felt like he was on top of the world, like nothing

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could stop him.

Everyone looked up to Uncle Wuga and Uncle Black because they were the oldest and wisest on the block.

Soon, 075 (another way to say 75th Street) had a lot more teenagers who also looked up to the older men on the block—all the little teenage boys. Their uncles kept them on the right path, too. They didn’t tell them anything they shouldn’t hear, and they never did anything bad in front of them. They all had a good time without the gangs and the drugs and all that unnecessary violence.

Everything was all good, until one day Uncle Wuga and his baby-mama Bone walked into the gas station. A gun boomed—POP POP. An unknown and unfamiliar man whispered, “R.I.P.” Wuga was lying on the concrete, breathless and motionless. People screamed, “Oh my God, someone do something!

Hello!? Hello!?”

His girlfriend Bone was lost. It felt as if no one was there. Everything was all bad for the 075 family. The funeral was the most devastating scene. To see a gangster cry is like watching a puppy get run over by a car. That year, 2002, was a terrible year for their family, including Antonio. They lost their auntie, who was his granny, they lost Uncle Wuga, his favorite uncle, and they lost half of their hearts. Nobody knew what was going to become of 075. No one knew that soon it would be a block full of bangers who ganged together to defeat their rivals.

That wasn’t something Wuga would tolerate. Soon 075 became “7nickle,” which was just another way to say “75th.” After “7nickle” became “WugaWorld.” WugaWorld went from hanging on corners to banging on the corners. From all for one and one for

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all, to if one of us trip then all of us fall.

Antonio became T.O, and then Bankroll. All of his names changed as he grew into the streets. This just shows how much the streets can change you.

Bankroll didn’t know where to turn.

Even a lion can get lost in the jungle, and soon Bankroll found himself stuck in the madness.

Through all this craziness, even years later, his beloved girlfriend, Monk, was by his side. One day, Bankroll was caught with a gun and was sentenced to two years in prison. At this time, Monk was a couple weeks pregnant.

After prison, Bankroll went back to his normal life. He was just more careful because he had a little boy looking up to him. For three years everything was normal on the block: the bros in and out of jail, smoking dope, playing dice, losing friends and family due to guns. Same old, same old. Bankroll decided to attempt to go back to the street life.

One night, while the baby was asleep, Antonio said, “I’ll be back tomorrow, babes.” He kissed his girlfriend and son as if he was going to be gone forever.

Tomorrow turned into two weeks.

But then one day, he walked into his home yelling, “I’m back.” Neither Monk nor their 3-year-old boy, TayTay, were in sight. The bathroom was empty, so was the kitchen, and the front room. As he walked up to the door of their bedroom he could already see pain in his girlfriend’s face. She looked as if she had lost her best friend.

Bankroll took a deep breath and asked, “What’s good? You look nasty!” She raised her face slowly and looked him in the eye. For two minutes, no words were said. Soon, they began to spill out

of her mouth. She choked a little and her voice went in and out as she said, “I’m pregnant.”

With a confused expression Bankroll said, “You say what?”

She laughed and repeated her words: “I’m pregnant.”

He rubbed his head. Monk looked at him as if she was surprised at his reaction. Bankroll looked back up slowly and laughed with joy. “Oh Lord, I bet it’s a boy,” he said. They both jumped and Monk screamed with joy.

That night, Bankroll couldn’t sleep. He was so excited, but also kind of scared at the same time. He knew there was money that had to be made, but he didn’t want to make it the way he normally did. Things were definitely going to change after his second child was born.

Nine months later, Bankroll had his second child. All he cares about now is his family. He has been on the block, but he hasn’t been involved with any gang activity or drug violence.

Monk has a job, and Antonio is on the search for one. Their kids, KayKay and TayTay, are doing great. KayKay is a few months old and TayTay attends preschool.

“I feel like my kids are a sign from God,” he said. “He is telling me to slow down.” He finally learned the true meaning of growing. “It’s not about what you can do. It’s about what you do.” Antonio learned how to be a man.

“You’re all I need,” Antonio said as he kissed his child.

Originally published in Even a Lion Can Get Lost in the Jungle, a collection of short stories by 7th and 8th grade students at Englewood’s Harvard School of Excellence, with 826CHI.

ian d. merritt and idm photography

Annesti Shae Monae Walker is from the South Side of Chicago and loves to dance and listen to music. She is a great writer but an even better poet. Next year she will be attending Dunbar High School. august 1, 2014 âœś south side weekly 9

nonfiction

#205: The Spirit We Have Here paul dailing

T

he man with the dusty Obama/Biden cap, the “Born to be Wild” leather vest, and the whitedappled mustache and soul patch has been coming to the 63rd Street Beach since 1966.

“Every day,” he said as his fingers flitted along a recorder’s surface.

That’s recorder as in plastic flute from a grade school music room. A drumbeat slowed in the background.

On nights when the weather’s good and the beach

He’s come to place that recorder between the mustache and soul patch and twirl, whirl, twitter on a bird-flow song to accompany congas, bongos, djembes. is full of swimmers, laughing kids and young lovers, families barbecuing and teens sneaking off to flirt with each other and practice their flow, the man with the dusty cap has come to the shadow of the old beach house. He’s come to place that recorder between the mustache and soul patch and twirl, whirl, twitter on a bird-flow song to accompany congas, bongos, djembes—all the slapped, shaken, shimmied instruments of the 63rd Street Beach Drum Circle.

Since 1966, they’ve come to Jackson Park.

The men just accumulate, mostly old, with a few young acolytes drawn by the sound. One by one, they show up.

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A man all in white, from his Kangol cap to the shoes on his feet, was part of the early group. He yelled bits to the other musicians, gave a brief speech to the small crowd of gawkers. The drums never stopped as he talked.

An old man with a dashiki and a stately white afro walked up to a round of handshakes and hugs when he arrived.

A Hispanic man with an American flag button-up shirt danced in the middle. The other Hispanic man in the circle was a young guy with a military-grade buzz cut and wicking performance athletic gear.

A wizened man draped in kente cloth with a hat half between coolie and kufi wandered around, looking for a spot to join. He had small drums and a large polished stick that came to a circle at the top.

Some wore slacks and long shirts. Some wore African clothes of pride. Some wore leather biker vests and dusty Obama/Biden baseball caps.

“We came from the Point,” the man with the dusty cap said during a break.

He waved the hand that wasn’t holding the recorder toward the north.

“On 55th,” he said.

He flicked those same fingers south.

“Then we moved to Rainbow Beach,” he said. “But that didn’t have the spirit we have here, so we came back.”

I wanted to ask questions. I wanted to know why, how these old men kept a song going for nearly fifty years. I wanted to know that spirit, the one that created a half-century circle on a beach in Jackson Park.

I wanted to ask, but the drums started again, ending our conversation.

poetry

Spokane hannah o’grady

My roommate is gone for the weekend so she left me her penknife, the one she usually wears on a gold-colored chain around her neck.

She won’t need it where she’s going, which is to her aunt’s goat farm in Washington, where I can imagine the bucolic clouds of fluff and red meat tumbling over those wooly mountains of Spokane.

(How much moss does a rolling goat gather?)

The roommate says, baby goats are tottering along and butting their heads and probably filling out 401(k)s just twenty-four hours after birth.

What were you doing twenty-four hours after you were born?

Not much.

My parents gave me a penknife when I was six years old (what were they thinking?)

At any rate, I never gave myself or anyone else any serious injuries. Cross my heart.

I lost the thing, in fact. nicholas cassleman

We had a game called “O’Grady’s Goat” at home.

It’s got eighty-nine strips of paper and you’re supposed to match them all up or something but we never could learn how because it was printed in 1895 in Springfield, Mass. and all the pages crumble to bits when you pick them up.

Which may be the problem with history, come to think of it. (the crumbliness, I mean) so that all you can really do with the wars and marches and last Sunday’s leftovers is to feed it all into a great pot of foliage and glue and churn it out again in columns of chicken scratch.

The children wash it down with their milk.

Does the rule about guns and plays apply to knives and poems, too?

Anyway, you can’t make history out of little bits of brown paper, and you can’t make a wool coat out of them either.

I hope my roommate knows that, and that it’s not too cold out there in the Northwest corner, so she doesn’t need her penknife for shearing.

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fiction

Callie jack murphy

I

asked my six-year-old cousin for her autograph today. She didn’t know what an autograph was.

“Your name,” I said. “I want you to write your name.” I handed her my pen.

“What for?” she said, and then, “Okay.”

We were in a coffee shop named for Dostoevsky. A book sat at every table, like a centerpiece. It was almost December in Chicago, and the cold air blew in as each new customer came and left. My cousin shivered in her seat.

C A L L I E, she wrote on the napkin that had come with our tea.

“That’s a space pen,” I told her.

“The same one the astronauts use. You can write with it underwater or upside down or in zero gravity. What do you think about that?”

“It’s silver,” she said. She took an extremely tiny sip from her cup.

“So do you have a boyfriend?” I asked her, like my dad would have.

“Mmhm,” she said. She was writing her name over and over again. Her blonde hair obscured her face. Mittens were buttoned to the sleeves of her jacket.

CALLI E CAL L I E C A L L I E CA

hanna petroski

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august 1, 2014

L L I E C A L L I E, she wrote.

“Are you still six?” I asked. “When is your birthday?”

She stopped writing and considered the question.

“Four weeks,” she said, holding up her fingers to show me. A Peter Pan Band-Aid was slowly unpeeling from around her thumb.

“Who are you inviting to your party?” I asked.

CALLIE CALLIE CALLIE CALLIE C A L L I E C A L L I E , she wrote.

“I’m twenty-five now,” I said. “I hate my job. All my friends are getting married.”

Her tongue poked out from the corner of her mouth in concentration.

The pen looked big in her little hand.

“My dad is building me a tree house,” she said without looking up.

Around the cafe, people sat alone.

There was no line to order drinks; the barista looked bored.

“Let’s Instagram this,” I told her, pulling out my phone.

But she was already out of her chair at the sight of her mother through the window. Her shoes lit up as she skipped away towards the door. The napkin she left was wet at its corners.

CALLIE CALLIE CA L L I E C A L L I E C A L L I E, it said.

interview

The Hip-Hop Poet maira khwaja

N

ate Marshall met me in the middle of Hyde Park wearing a t-shirt bearing the names “Emmett, Amadou, Sean, Oscar, Trayvon, Jordan,” followed by a “&...”. The slam poetry star from the far South Side doesn’t soften the tone of his statements on race and violence when he’s offstage. Marshall achieved city-wide and even national fame in the critically-acclaimed 2010 documentary Louder Than a Bomb (LTAB), about a slam poetry competition of the same name, as a bookish high school senior from the “100s block” who focused his afterschool hours and stresses on poetry. The then-eighteen-years old Marshall, a six-year slam-competition veteran, was portrayed as the elder of the teen competition. He won the 2008 final with a poem, “Look!” that ended with a thank you to the LTAB community for providing a forum to talk about “sex, drugs, basketball, and moms.” Now twenty-four, Marshall is coaching at the Young Chicago Authors summer program. After majoring in English at Vanderbilt, he continued his study of creative writing and poetry at the University of Michigan’s Masters in Fine Arts program. His thesis, titled “Wild Hundreds,” begins with a James Baldwin quote, “you don’t ever leave home.” He and the themes of his work show no sign of doing so. Marshall graduated in May, with at least four promising projects—many continuing his reflection on the South Side and violence—to be released within a year. We sat down to talk about his growth as a poet, his upcoming work, and what “hip-hop poetry” really means.

You went to college at Vanderbilt.

What was that like, going from Chicago to Nashville?

You know, I love Nashville, and it’s weird because I didn’t expect to, and I think I even resisted it for a while. I think I always liked Vanderbilt, I had a good time there, I had a good experience there, but it was really different for me, and in some ways I think it was a really essential education. I think I began to understand some of the things that I had grown up seeing. I was able to understand them better, having had

ried in our bodies without us realizing it and it should be out later in the summer. until we have some distance to see that It’s framed as a meditation on violence, all of our cultural context isn’t universal. particularly youth violence, particularly here. So what frames it are these short How was Michigan after that? poems, and some of them are published in the Beloit Poetry Journal as a single I had a good time in Michigan. I think I thing, but they are numbered based was really lucky and that my cohort and on the number of homicides that hapthe cohort above and behind me were pened during my senior year of high really cool; we got along pretty well and school. So they go from one, starting they were generous readers of my work. on the first day of school for us, to my I got a lot of positive reinforcement in graduation day. That number, the last Michigan that I didn’t really expect to number, was 333. get.

So that has been much of the work. I’m In what way? also working on finishing up a hip-hop album, with one of my homies from Like, I won awards when I was there— high school, Jus Love, which we’ve been a lot of things happened for me there working on for a couple years now, but that didn’t happen in Vanderbilt. What that’s finally coming to a close. I also I thought had propelled me at Vander- have my thesis from graduate school, bilt was my sort of just knowing this is which is a manuscript, and which I’m what I wanted to be doing, whereas at submitting to publishers now. It’s called Michigan there were actually external “Wild Hundreds,” and it’s about the forces saying, “You’re on the right track, South Side. In some ways. In some you’re doing the right things. The work ways not! I think it’s a hard prospect to you’re doing here is valuable and val- say what a book of poems is “about,” beued.” But it was cool. I think the poetry cause it’s not narrative, not fiction, not that distance, having had that perspec- community in Ann Arbor was cool and about something. Poetry meditates on tive of living in different places. fed me in a couple of interesting ways. things.

There was a fellowship through the uniLike what? versity that allowed me to teach for In- I’ve also read a little bit about Breakside Out, which is a youth organization Beat Poets, and I’m really interested in Like, for example, Vanderbilt’s hand that works in Detroit, so that was great. that. signal, the “VU,” is similar to the gang I loved Detroit and my students. One sign for the Vice Lords. When I first of them just texted me today: “Can you Oh, yeah, yeah! I forgot about that, I’m got to college I wouldn’t throw it be- teach me about line breaks?” doing too many things. So the BreakBeat cause my neighborhood back home Poets is an anthology. The full title is, The was GD and even though I’m not af- What have you been working on since BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in filiated it felt like a kind of betrayal. grad school? the Age of Hip-Hop. It’s sort of inspired That’s maybe a small, stupid example by a number of anthologies, like the but I think it illustrates really clearly So right now I’m finishing up a chap- New American Poetry, edited by Donald the ways that our upbringing gets car- book, which is called Blood Percussion, Allen, that happened in the sixties, and august 1, 2014

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ellie mejia

also Black Fire, which was an anthology edited by Amiri Baraka, which puts forth some of the stuff about the Black Arts aesthetic. So our anthology is going to be released by Haymarket Press in, I believe, February 2015. I’m one of the editors with Quraysh Ali Lansana, who was formerly a professor at Chicago State, and Kevin Coval, who is the artistic director at Young Chicago Authors and also teaches at UIC through the school of art and art history. So the three of us are editing this thing, and it’s a bunch of poems and we’re sort of finalizing that this summer also. It has folks ranging from those born in the early sixties to the nineties—essentially youth. There are also essays in it. I guess what it sort of is hoping to do, or hopefully does, is make a kind of artistic or aesthetic argument for what “Hip-Hop Poetry” is or might be, and also just how hip hop in general has impacted the artistic landscape or the landscape of contemporary poetry. At least for me, it’s sort of an undeniable truth that it has,

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but it’s one of these things that people in academia either really get but don’t have the knowledge basis to talk about it or are like, “That’s not true.” And those people are wrong, probably.

What would you say is hip-hop poetry?

That’s a hard question. I think it can be many things. I think that I would first make an argument that hip-hop is not solely hip-hop. So the thing that we think about as the “hip-hop generation”—those folks who are engaged in youth-driven culture, kind of post-disco, post-soul, seventies up to now—the argument that I would make is that hip-hop is a part of that ecosystem but it’s not the only thing in that ecosystem; I think that house music is a part of that, I think that go-go music is a part of that, I think that Baltimore club, techno, music from Detroit, bounce music from New Orleans, all of these things are a part of that. Hip-hop is just

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sort of the main language that we speak hip-hop was initially sort of sparked by because it was in New York, it was in poetry and poets. Amiri Baraka menthe cultural center. tored The Last Poets who people consider the sort of direct forbearers of But I think that there are a couple of hip-hop. And then you go to the 1990s things that sort of build up a hip-hop in New York and you see Mos Def and aesthetic. Number one, I think the in- Talib Kweli were also in the same spacterest and ease and the use of sampling es as Saul Williams and Jessica Care as an idea, just the idea of being able to Moore and a lot of the folks who sort of pull from anywhere, I think that’s some became a part of the slam generation in super hip-hop shit. There’s a renewed current-day Chicago. You know, Malinterest in sound, in rhyme, in things colm London and Chance the Rapper being actually sonically pleasing. Be- are in the same crew, and that shit is not cause in a lot of ways, in the contempo- a mistake, right! Like, Vic Mensa went rary moment, minus a few folks like the to high school with me. I was the first New Formalists or shit like that, a lot of person to take him into a studio. That’s people have become really uninterested not a coincidence. in the sonics of a poem. The idea of a rhyming poem is crazy for some folks Who were your greatest hip-hop and in the contemporary landscape. And I poetry influences when you started think that hip-hop begins to introduce writing? those things, or hip hop is a kind of narrative, or a narrative form that uses Amiri Baraka was one of the first peoa singular “I” to speak to a generational ple I saw perform who made me wanna “We.” So I think you see a lot of that go and put some shit down. I saw him stuff happening in poetry. And a lot of first on Def Poetry. A lot of stuff that

happened on Def Poetry was influential for me. Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, were also super influential to me. James Weldon Johnson has this book called God’s Trombones, which is all about black homiletic church tradition. It tells of these canonical sermons circa the turn of the twentieth century that were in the black church tradition at that moment. Richard Wright has this one essay that I always go back to called “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”

Which is dope. He wrote it when he was in Chicago, when he was doing a lot of organizing of artist communities in Chicago and it lays out not only artistic principles but also what the artist’s responsibility is to the community,

pretty much anyone. Black Thought is incredible. Lupe back when was someone I learned a lot from.

Do you rap a lot now?

I try to. I love hip-hop. I love rhyming.

I like and still make records and I still enjoy doing shows and whatever. And a lot of my friends are still MCs or producers, so I’m still engaged in those communities.

You said in a recent essay, “A Code Switch Memoir,” that you developed a fondness for formal poetry. Was that after you were involved in slam?

“The argument that I would make is that hip-hop is a part of that ecosystem but it’s not the only thing in that ecosystem.” to one’s race, to one’s fellow artists. It’s not a mistake that all his shit is based here. There’s this book, I can’t remember the title, but the authors’ last names are Bone and Courage; they wrote this book [The Muse in Bronzeville, by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage] that stakes the claim that Chicago’s literary scene post-Harlem in the 1930s was equally important to the development of black literature as the Harlem Renaissance. You have Gwendolyn Brooks, you have Margaret Walker, you have Frank Marshall Davis. Frank Marshall Davis is a big one.

I would say that probably happened sometime around high school, but kind of concurrent to the slam. I think it was because I started looking at Shakespeare and started looking at sonnets and I was like, “You know what he’s actually doing? He’s writing shit in the common parlance, he’s using context to create new vocabulary—so he’s nouning verbs and verbing nouns to make new words.”

Shakespeare added hundreds of words to the English language just by doing stuff like that. And that’s the same shit Chief Keef does. That’s what rappers do all day.

In terms of hip-hop, I would say Talib Kweli—the song “The Blast” really made me want to write. The group, The Clipse were just rhythmically genius and had some of the illest flows I’ve ever heard. Mos Def, then and now, has influenced me, and Common. Who else? I think Biggie, though more now, I was sort of late to come around to Biggie. Big Pun can just rap circles around

So when I went to college I wanted to study more “traditional” poetry because I felt like it was important to know that as well as I knew spoken word stuff or hip-hop stuff. I wanted to be wellversed, and that was really important and a really good decision for me in college. I had a professor named Mark Jarman, and he’s really important in the New Formalist movement. So he’s all august 1, 2014

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interview

about sonnets and formal poetry. At first when we met, we did not get along.

But by the end of my time at Vanderbilt, we were really close, and I think we both taught each other a lot about poetry and how to think about poetry. My last year there we did an independent study that was about hip-hop poetry, and essentially we would sit in his office for a couple hours every week and we’d just argue. I’d play him Dead Prez songs, and Kweli, and they said things like “Yeah! Black people don’t trust books!” and he was like, “What does that mean? Why?” And then I’d write that in an essay. It helped me learn and

You’re rhyming things in a particular way, so if you just shift a couple of things....” So I wrote a pantun, on accident. So there’s that, and then there’s the fact that every poem has a form—a lot of times it’s just about figuring out what that is, if it’s an infinite form or just a form specific to that particular poem or a kind of received form, like a sestina or a pantun or rap verse. I think that if I go into a poem knowing, “Oh I want to write a sestina, or to write a sonnet,” then that does impact the writing process. Sometimes it can be a little more artificial, which can be good or it can stifle it.

“Every poem has a form—a lot of times it’s just about figuring out what that is.”

think a lot about my aesthetic and what I thought was important, and I think it also expanded his ability to read work that was different from the things he had been taught and find literary value in.

Are the writing processes different for you, between formal and informal poetry, like the hip-hop or rapping that you do?

Rapping is different because I don’t have to worry about what the shit looks like. It’s all about sound, so the editing process is different. It’s just more purely sonic driven, instead of trying to strike a balance. The thing is, if I’m writing a poem, even if it’s not a sonnet or sestina or whatever, every poem has a form. So when you’re writing, you’re just sort of writing, and then I think after that you try to figure out what the form of the poem is. So I’ve accidentally written poems that are formal poems, but once I wrote a poem and later on someone pointed out, “This could be a pantun.

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What are you doing next?

I don’t know. I wanna get all the projects that I have in the air now, I wanna get them out. So the chapbook will be coming this year. Then early next year, the anthology. Hopefully I’ll get the manuscript picked up by a publisher in the near future, and then I guess beyond that, I have until May with this fellowship at the University of Michigan. And while doing that, I’ll be doing some work in Ann Arbor with the Neutral Zone, and also Young Chicago Authors here. And you know, beyond that, I don’t know, I’m a little open, which is exciting and a little nervewracking, but I’d be cool with going into academia, I’d be cool with doing nonprofit work, you know, maybe I’d be cool with doing some full-time artistry educational consulting. I could do a jillion things, which sometimes makes it hard to figure out what you’re actually trying to do.

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pronounce nate marshall

wild hundreds starts with a tire’s squeal at getaway. broken whistle of the coffee kettle because work is waiting. while. next part is a clan, a wild bunch on the outskirts of civil. the name she calls you when she loves you casually. hun. the end, a beginning. what we say when we name ourselves. a dropped letter to save time. its. wildhundreds wilhundreds wilhundeds whilehunits.

fiction

Crepúsculo

Dusk

Pa’ ti Simon, y pa’l broder

For you, Simon, and for your brother

El tinte crepuscular de un monte azul en la distancia se mide en recuerdos, no muy lejanos, de un hombre ausente, conmovido en la cima de una fotografía estrujada. Sólo puedo desafiar el olvido con su imagen desvelada y sus ojos color piedra de río.

The sunset shades of a far away hill dipped in blue are measured in memories, still fresh, of a man now gone, moved atop the summit of a crumpled snapshot. I can only resist forgetting invoking his sleepless face and his eyes the color of smooth river stones.

—Cabrón—es lo único que puedo decir antes de caer escaleras abajo, impelido por su empujón de cuate conspirador.

—Cabrón—is all I can say before I fall down the stairs, propelled by the shove he gives me in cahoots.

Ese recuerdo se lo llevó a la tumba y ahora sólo queda el mío. El de su cara enmarcada por el marco de la puerta, y no el de él, el de mi imagen rodando por las escalones de madera raída por millones de huevadas anteriores.

He took that memory to his grave and now there’s only mine. Mine, of his face framed by the doorway, and not his, of me tumbling down those wooden stairs worn smooth by millions of previous scuffles.

Crepúsculo obligatorio, pérdida voluntaria, el universo visto a través del gatillo y la explosión bermeja que lo sacudió entre los árboles. Cada puesta de sol será pues un adiós oculto en el silencio de una distancia insospechada, una despedida ahogada con lágrimas pasadas, de otra época, un recuerdo que despierta con la luna.

Cada amanecer nos trae otro día alumbrado con tu ausencia de ángel borracho, de sabiduría nocturna, de mis nocturna, de mis amigos en el bosque azul, en las afueras de la ciudad.

Mandatory dusk, voluntary loss, the universe seen through the trigger and the crimson explosion that shook him amidst the trees.

Every sunset will now be a secret adiós in the stillness of an unsuspected distance, a goodbye drowned by bygone tears, a memory that rises with the moon. Every sunrise brings us yet another day shining with the absence of you, drunken angel, of nocturnal know-how, of my friends in the blue forest, on the outskirts of the city.

rafael franco

translated by the author

Originally published in Contratiempo, a Chicago-based Spanish-language literary journal.

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fiction

Sue jack murphy

S

ue is the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever discovered. She is forty-two feet long and thirteen feet tall. Her skull weighs six hundred pounds. She weighed nine tons, when she was alive.

She was discovered by Sue Hendrikson, for whom she is named.

Near Sue, sitting at a small table for two, up against one of the Field Museum’s giant pillars, is a boy. He’s wearing a white t-shirt, an Oakland Raiders ball cap, and tight black jeans.

He clasps his phone desperately. It lights up every few seconds through the cracks in his hands.

His dad is across from him. He’s short, with a goatee. The very bottom of a tattoo shows under his huge red polo. The polo is tucked into cargo shorts with endless pockets; the various museum pamphlets, maps, and tickets poke out all over.

They’re sitting there, in the shadow of Sue, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever discovered, about to eat their lunch.

“Well,” the man says.

“Yea,” the kid says back.

“Whadaya say?” the man asks.

“I don’t know,” the boy replies, and then, “Thanks.”

“Pretty impressive. She’s huge!”

“Yeah, a huge pile of bones.”

They have Sue posed right there in front, combat stance, looking ferocious. Sue, with teeth like steak knives and eyes like snow globes. Sue, who really lived and really walked around, in

hanna petroski

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South Dakota, of all places. Sue, a Tyrant Lizard King if there ever was one.

“So...ah, so how’s your sister?” the man asks, “How’s Dawn?”

“Good,” he says. He stares at his hands.

“Good, good. And…baseball?

How’s that going?”

He’s busy with his phone, takes a sip from the styrofoam cup in front of him.

“You’re in, what—seventh grade now?”

“Fifth,” he says.

“Right, right. I was gonna say.” The man takes a big bite of his sandwich, a handful of chips. The boy’s sandwich sits untouched.

“Who’re you emailing?” he asks, but seems to know even before the words leave his mouth the boy will never say. The man’s got this look like he wants to tell the kid to put that thing away, to look him in the eye, to have fun goddammit...but just can’t muster the authority. Hey, I’m trying, his eyes say instead.

“What about, uh,” he pauses, “Your mother? What’s your mother up to these days?”

And the kid says—nothing. He doesn’t say anything.

During her life, Sue suffered a damaged shoulder blade and three broken ribs. Her left fibula is twice the diameter of the right one, the result of infection. Sue did not die as a result of these injuries; her cause of death is not known.

poetry

The Ballroom Artists’ Commune susan hogan

O Ballroom! I extol you!

Outside you, Burnham’s bridges strangle up my native town. Inside— Piano raucous rocking through the night!

And I survived on a meager diet of paintchips and our communal pinenut pudding.

All the time making up obstacle courses (of course) for unicycling across your wide wooden floors, huge windows gathering up the open light.

O Ballroom! Lithuanian Ballroom!

The Texas Ballroom!

At the corner of Archer and Lock!

In the heart of Bridgeport.

You knew the Bridgeport Coffeehouse.

You knew the Bridgeport Bakery.

You knew the bicycles carried up stairways.

And the lull of the Stevenson, beckoning you to stilted dreams at night.

Ballroom transformed into our home, only partially constructed partitions, no solid walls.

All your interior architecture falling apart like applesauce.

O Ballroom! With your splashed acrylics, smashed glass mosaics, trapeze artist spinning and Bach’s cello suites spraying out over Dylan’s crooning from somebody else’s room— You made me mad to be alive, backdrop for a ballerina shoveling all of life’s meaning into one enormous room.

Poem for Tice susan hogan

Two unlikely lovers meeting in the dark —your name. (They meet again.)

Your name is the chatter of a flurry of finches.

It is delicate but practiced as the steps of the nervous tightrope walker.

Your name—

pink toes in May, or mornings in a Pilsen apartment— tittering asparagus (in the pan after the lemon’s hiss.)

Originally published in Anthology of Chicago, a literary project collecting poems and stories that evoke the spirit of Chicago’s many neighborhoods.

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jamie hibdon

The Lion linus recht

F

or as long as anyone could remember, there had been a lion on the second floor of A. B. Calloway elementary school. It had always been school policy that if a student misbehaved, he or she’d be sent to see the lion and never be seen or heard from again. But even so, the lion was very highly respected. Sure, technically he was a disciplinary figure, but he was just doing his job; nobody held it against him. In fact, at some point (about thirty years ago? something like that) he had been voted the school mascot. Really, everybody loved the lion.

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But one day, Ms. Dearborn opened her fifth grade homeroom with grim news: the lion was dying. A gasp went up from the class.

“But what about the big game against Englewood? How are we going to win without him?”

“I’m sure we’ll manage, Francesca.

He’ll still be our mascot, after all. He’ll just be watching down from heaven.”

“You’re crazy,” said George, “the lion was here when my granddad went to school; there’s no way he’d die.”

“I’m sorry George,” said Ms. Dearborn gently, “but it’s true. The fact is,

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everyone has to die someday.”

“Wait a second,” said Harry, “Does this mean we can do whatever we want?”

“Harry, please,” said Ms. Dearborn.

“No, I’m serious—if the lion’s not around, that means that even if we break the rules—” “Harold, that kind of talk is highly inappropriate, especially at a time like this. But for your information, the board has decided the lion is so essential to our school that they are conducting interviews for a replacement as we speak.”

This caused quite a reaction in the

excitable young students. A new lion?

What if he didn’t look the same? How could he ever be as good as the old lion?

Wouldn’t he just die too? (Not to mention that, as Isaac pointed out, if the lion was indeed essential, it was hard to imagine how replacing him would be possible. Ms. Dearborn explained that what they meant was that his role is essential. He in his particularity merely fit the bill. Isaac remarked that that seemed rather cold; at this, his teacher merely shrugged.)

Amidst the clamor, only Jane remained silent. As Ms. Dearborn went

fiction

about restoring order to the classroom, Jane sat with eyes closed, apparently in deep thought. Finally she raised her hand.

“When,” she asked, “are they holding the interviews?”

At this, everyone laughed.

“You can’t be the new lion, you idiot!” cried Kirk.

“And why not?” snapped Jane.

“You’re just a dumb girl, anyway!”

She turned bright red. “You should talk, six-toes!”

It was true: he did have six toes.

“You’re still an idiot!”

“At least I’m not a—” “Simmer down this instant!” boomed Ms. Dearborn, and the class’s laughter shut off like a light. “Apologies, now! And there will be no more rabblerousing in my classroom.”

Jane and Kirk each grumbled their respective sorries.

“Now, Jane,” she said, “not just anyone can be the lion. You’re still very young, and you don’t have any relevant experience or—” “Ms. Dearborn, I don’t care about any of that! I think I can do it, and well, with all due respect, if the school board thinks I can’t, then let them say so!” She realized she was shouting and blushed.

“You know, in my opinion.”

Ms. Dearborn smiled. “All right Jane. Well as it happens the school board has decided that the only one suited to pick from the candidates is the lion himself. The interviews are going on all day today, no appointment needed. Now, right now we have to do the spelling test. But when you’re done, you may walk up to the second floor and try your best.”

“But Ms. Dearborn!” whined Kirk.

“That’s enough, Kirk,” she said sternly. “I expect you to support your classmate and be proud of her, just like she would be of you if you did something so courageous.”

“Ha!” said Harry. “The only courageous thing Kirk’s ever done is pick his nose in the middle of class!” Everyone laughed; even Ms. Dearborn couldn’t

help cracking a smile. Kirk just looked at the ground and took his finger out of his nose.

Ms. Dearborn handed out the spelling tests. Jane had memorized the whole list the night before, as usual. By the time Ms. Dearborn read out the third word, Jane had already finished.

She raised her hand.

“Yes Jane,” said Ms. Dearborn, “you may go.”

pers. “There’s no Jane on my list,” he said.

“Oh, no, I’m not here because I got in trouble. I’m here for the interview.”

The lion lowered his reading glasses. “You? Aren’t you a bit young?”

“Well, I don’t know, but frankly, I’d like to be the new lion. I think I’d be great for the job.”

The left side of the lion’s mouth turned up in a smile, showing off a line

It had always been school policy that if a student misbehaved, he or she’d be sent to see the lion.

She jumped out of her chair and practically ran to the door.

“Oh, and Jane?” said Ms. Dearborn.

Jane looked back at her from the doorway. “Good luck!”

“Thanks, Ms. Dearborn!” she said, and started walking down the hallway.

Soon enough she found herself in the lion’s room. The lion was stretched out on the floor alongside a few stacks of papers. He was a fine beast with glittering eyes and a great golden mane.

Jane looked around the room; she had never been there before. It looked much like Ms. Dearborn’s classroom downstairs: there was a blackboard and a few dozen desks, and the floor was spotlessly clean. Sitting at the desks were people of varying ages typing on typewriters.

At the desk in the far corner was Leroy, an eighth grader who had been sent to the lion a few months ago for having three late homework assignments.

The lion cleared his throat and Jane snapped to attention. “Ah, I’m sorry, I—” “Name,” he growled.

“Oh—I’m Jane.”

The lion pawed through some pa-

of sharp white teeth.

“Basically,” Jane continued, “I’m smart, I work hard, I care about the school, and overall, I think the whole setup suits me.”

“That’s all well and good, young lady,” said the lion. “But don’t you realize that there are many other candidates for this position? Some of them are very prestigious. What sets you apart from the crowd? What makes you the best?”

“Well,” said Jane, “like I said, I’m very smart and motivated. I have zero late homework assignments. Also, I can jump higher than any of the boys in the class, and all of the girls except Francesca. But Francesca’s dad is a basketball player, so when you think about it, it only makes sense.”

The lion nodded. “Fair enough. But how does that—” “Well, maybe jumping doesn’t directly have to do with the job,” admitted Jane. “But you know, I think physical fitness is probably important for any post where you have to discipline people.”

“That’s true.” The lion closed his eyes. “Yes, that’s definitely true.”

There passed a moment wherein no one said a thing. The room was silent but for the clickety-clacking of typewriters.

“Now Jane,” said the lion, “there’s something I need to tell you about this job.” He sat up straighter, and Jane noticed for the first time how very old he looked. His watery blue eyes, although strong and clear, were filled with a deep sadness.

“Yes?” “Well, in the first place, sometimes it’s a really hard job. Sometimes you have to stay late and do work when you’d really just like to go home. Or sometimes, people expect you to solve a problem even though you don’t have any idea how to solve it. Sometimes people even yell at you.”

“Even if you try your best?”

“Even if you try your best. But that’s not all. Even when you do your job perfectly—actually, even if you do it better than perfectly—hardly anybody ever tells you ‘good job.’ In fact,” he added, “you’re lucky if anyone even says ‘thank you.’ ” Jane looked at him, crushed. He had to be joking.

“I’m not joking,” he said, as though he were reading her mind. “I wish I were. Now, I’m not saying it’s altogether bad. Sometimes it’s actually pretty good. But sometimes, well, that’s what the job is actually like. In fact, sometimes, to a certain extent, that’s what all jobs are like.”

“Yeah,” agreed Leroy from the corner, “My dad says pretty much the same thing. Trust me, he’s telling the honest truth.”

All of the other typists turned to Leroy, horrified. Jane averted her eyes.

“NO TALKING!” thundered the lion.

“Oh, I’m—” The lion roared. In one fluid motion, he leapt across the room, threw Leroy on the ground, and ripped his throat out with his teeth.

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A Conversation with Kimberly Dixon-Mays rachel hyman

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i mberly Dixon-Mays is a poet, playwright, and performer. A Cave Canem and Ragdale fellow, she has published in journals including The Drunken Boat, Torch, Versal, and Reverie, and she released her first poetry collection, SenseMemory, with Blue Pantry Publishers. From 2004 to 2010 she was a writer and performer with the Poetry Performance Incubator project of the Guild Literary Complex. She became executive director of the Complex in 2010, producing the Incubator, the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards, and several other literary events and programs around Chicago. I interviewed Kimberly earlier this month to discuss “Hyde Park Walking Tour” and her own history with the neighborhood.

“Hyde Park Walking Tour” comes out of the Guild Literary Complex’s Poetry Performance Incubator. What’s the story behind that?

The Poetry Performance Incubator is a program that was started in 2004 by the Guild’s executive director, Ellen Wadey.

It brings together poets—who are normally very solitary and autonomous— to create original theater and think about things like audience, performance, and delivery. At the time I was a contestant for one of the Guild Complex’s other programs—the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards—and Ellen recruited me to direct the Incubator program. I ended up joining as a participant instead and stayed in the program all the way through 2010, when the Incubatees developed their first full play, Tour Guides, with artistic director Coya Paz. My own background is in theater. As a child, poetry was read aloud to me, so I’ve always thought of poetry in a performative way.

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What’s your own history with Hyde Park? Clearly you have a deep familiarity. I’m interested in the way “Hyde Park Walking Tour” goes beyond the easy ways of talking about the neighborhood—town vs. gown, the big bad University, etc.

I moved to Hyde Park around 2004, from having lived in Evanston since 1996. I was excited to move there, because it has the pace of a university town without being right in the hustle and bustle. There’s ethnic and age diversity. There are a lot of single people who aren’t starting families. I was never formally affiliated with the University, but my older brother was a graduate.

My first taste of Chicago was through him, when I would visit him from back east while I was still in high school.

to development in the neighborhood.

Like many, I’ve felt torn about the University in terms of what it’s brought— it’s done wonderful things and other things that could have been done differently, better. It’s this ambivalence I definitely felt the hand of the Unithat the piece is trying to tease out. versity. I recognized how my life was shaped. Everything from who my As a Hyde Parker, there’s this acute neighbors were and how the bus routes awareness of, and discomfort with, the were to what it was like to ride the bus neighborhood’s fraught history. Your at certain times of day and changes

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ellie mejia

last paragraph brings that guilt, in many different forms, into sharp relief.

I was very purposeful with talking about different types of guilt—I start with white liberal guilt, but move on to other types: “black professional guilt, young Turk guilt, battle-weary guilt.”

The piece came from a prompt in an Incubator rehearsal about gentrification, and is informed by my own experiences moving into and residing in

interview

the neighborhood. It was important to me to implicate a number of different kinds of people, because that’s what Hyde Park is.

There’s quite a bit of humor here, too.

You speak sarcastically of how beyond the borders of Hyde Park, “there be dragons.” How do you see this humor playing a role in the piece?

The humor helps to earn the right to say something that may be controversial. It also gets at the absurdity of what’s being said, or implied, when we talk about

living there 24/7, and vice versa. It’s definitely changing significantly. I’m reluctant to affiliate myself with folks who say it’s changing too much, but I also recognize there’s something to be said for its quirkiness, character, and distinctiveness that is worth preserving.

My older brother, the UChicago alum, would talk about how some of his classmates would visit Northwestern and it felt so odd to be on a campus like that.

Somebody described it as country clubish. They were proud of the rough edges of the UofC. I wonder if people who

“I’m reluctant to affiliate myself with folks who say it’s changing too much, but I also recognize there’s something to be said for its quirkiness, character, and distinctiveness that is worth preserving.”

Hyde Park—“there be dragons” indeed.

There is racism and classism implicit in a comment like that. I tried to make the humor be about the speaker’s own discomfort with what they were saying and feeling internally, which comes in part because it’s being performed by an African American (me). The humor comes from this discomfort leaking out and undercutting the speaker’s other fawning words about Hyde Park, “our oasis in an oasis.”

Hyde Park, like all neighborhoods, is in flux. With all of the new development on 53rd Street, and the University’s push south, there’s a keen sense among residents that the neighborhood is changing. Any thoughts on the shape this development is taking?

I’ve moved out of the neighborhood, so it’s a little hard for me to say—the things that might seem great from the outside might not be great if you’re

are expressing ambivalence, including myself, are mourning the passing of some of those rough edges, the particular character of the neighborhood.

Even the phrase “rough edges” is problematic, though—I mean it as more of a metaphor about the neighborhood’s character than a geographic statement about what surrounds Hyde Park.

“Hyde Park Walking Tour” challenges the myth that horrible things live just past the border of the neighborhood, and the contrast that has been cultivated where Hyde Park is this jewel of the South Side keeping what’s outside at bay.

Hyde Park Walking Tour kimberly dixon-mays

Ahhhhhhh...ll right, do we have everyone? Everyone for the Hyde Park walking tour, this way...

Hyde Park. Chicago. Illinois. See our many amenities—schools for foreign languages, like macroeconomics. A bakery that feeds and waits on you in buttery French. What’s that? Yes, that’s right: white folks! We do have white folks in Hyde Park! Look how they walk around safely. Asians and Latinos, too. Even old-money Black folks....Well, old-ish. Hyde Park, ladies and gentlemen: our oasis in an oasis! But bits of sand always fly in.

Kindly look this way, away from the bits of trash...sweatshirt crumpled on the tracks. Please pay no attention that we treat Hyde Park like a too-long girlfriend...crumpled napkin with orange pizza grease. Look to your right and left instead—notice how beautiful she still is: strong trees, sturdy bricks, green lots. You can see it if you don’t look her head-on—she can’t keep her eyes soft when she looks back. Rubber ring of the mouth of a condom, or a balloon. Still can’t see it sir? Try squinting—or bits from the outside blow in.

Certain maps—made of paper that folds to the size of a brain cell, drawn in disappearing ink—say civilization stops at 18th Street, doesn’t start again until 47th. Those maps have thin spots in between, hopscotch from the Loop to the South Loop to Bronzeville to us, the edge of the world. Further, there be dragons! But see how people slow in Hyde Park, linger like in a small town...until a laugh too big or a bang too loud, when we tense, and wonder if that will be the thing to pry our fingernails off the urban edge, send us hurtling to burst on rocks below. Because, ladies and gentlemen, Hyde Park also has...guilt. White liberal guilt, black professional guilt, young Turk guilt, battle-weary guilt, believer guilt, heathen guilt, survivor guilt, failure guilt... we’re all ashamed of ourselves, for wishing Hyde Park had more like ourselves. The bits from the outside creep in.

First developed while a member of the Poetry Performance Incubator of Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex.

Rachel Hyman is the founder and head editor of Anthology of Chicago, a neighborhood-focused literary project where “Hyde Park Walking Tour” was first published. august 1, 2014

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profile

Hide and Seek

The children’s novels of Blue Balliett emily lipstein

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ver since author Blue Balliett published her first novel, Chasing Vermeer, ten years ago, her readers have been made to discover the mysteries and coincidences intrinsic to their lives. By taking the real world and rendering it mysterious, Balliett fosters in children and re-instills in adults an appreciation for the magic of coincidence and connection.

Balliett grew up in New York City.

As a child, she spent a lot of her time in museums. Those early experiences proved to be formative: she eventually graduated from Brown with a degree in art history. She published poetry and two oral histories shortly after graduating.

Balliett and her family eventually moved to Hyde Park, where Balliett began teaching third grade at the University of Chicago Laboratory School.

She thinks back fondly on her ten years spent teaching at Lab; she describes the student body as “a wonderful little learning community.” Teaching at Lab led her to write Chasing Vermeer, which tells the story of two Lab students who solve a heist at the Art Institute through their cleverness and attention to detail.

She wrote the book for her students to use in the classroom, never thinking that it would end up being published.

“That’s why it’s so wild,” she admits.

“I was a little bit on the wild side as a teacher.” After publishing Chasing Vermeer, she quit teaching to write full time. Since Vermeer she has written four books, including Pieces & Players, which is set in Kenwood and slated to come out in the spring of 2015.

In her fiction, Balliett takes the world around her readers and reveals its intrigue and its endless possibilities. Her books differ from the typical children’s novel because of the admiration and respect she has for her younger readers. She mentions her favorite book from her own childhood, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg, with its smart and spunky protagonists, and how important it is to her even now.

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“Kids really can absorb what they read at that period,” said Balliett. The mysteries she writes aren’t solved by a professional Sherlock Holmes; instead, Balliett lets the spotlight shine on schoolchildren and their own unique abilities.

Part of the way that she accomplishes this is by ascribing great significance to coincidences and patterns. “For kids,” she says, “pattern recognition is just natural.” By noticing and paying attention to seemingly inconsequential things—like the pentominoes (geometric game tiles) in Chasing Vermeer—she transforms an impossible mystery into

ican families as a result of the failing economy, she recognized that nothing was being said about the responses of children.

“I decided I needed to get closer to these kids and use writing to shine a light, to give kids a chance to shine,” Balliett explained. “I almost didn’t write [it]. I said to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, how can I write this book? I have to be sure I can get this right.’ ” In order to “get it right,” Balliett spent four years doing extensive research, eventually leading her to a little boy named Jayden who attended an after-school tutoring program at a West

“It’s a pleasure opening things up for kids,” she comments. “I’m just hiding the vitamins in the process.”

a solvable puzzle. Balliett’s novels also contain plots about important cultural figures and their works: Chasing Vermeer is about a Vermeer art heist, while another novel, Hold Fast, incorporates the poetry of Langston Hughes. Balliett doesn’t see these topics as too obscure for the middle-grade kids who read her books.

“It’s a pleasure opening things up for kids,” she comments. “I’m just hiding the vitamins in the process. What you read at that age is very important.”

Chasing Vermeer and its sequels, The Wright 3 and The Calder Game, draw from Balliett’s art history background, but Hold Fast, published last year, pulls from knowledge and experiences she didn’t have before writing. The book’s main character is an eleven-year-old girl from Woodlawn named Early Pearl, living with her siblings and mother in a shelter near the Harold Washington Library. After years of becoming more aware of what was happening to Amer-

Side shelter. When Balliett met Jayden, he asked her what her story was, but she couldn’t answer him. “He told me that everybody’s got a story. At that moment,” Balliett reflects, “I decided that if he could welcome me into his world of a shelter with so much generosity and grace, then I can write this book.”

All of the children she met at programs like Jayden’s had no problem sharing their stories: they told her about where they used to live and how they wanted to fix what was wrong. These conversations inspired the solution to homelessness Early proposes in Hold Fast.

Balliett dedicated Hold Fast to Jayden, but she isn’t sure if he knows this: the only information she has about Jayden is that his mother took him and his sisters out of the shelter. She hopes that Jayden will one day realize that he has his own book.

poetry

Malabares luis alejandro ordóñez

La luz cambió a rojo. Al detenerme, el harapiento bufón se paró frente al carro. Con maneras más hambrientas que artísticas me mostró sus manos, nada por aquí, nada por allá. Sacó de sus bolsillos cuatro pequeñas esferas, les prendió fuego y las lanzó al aire. Las bolas de fuego saltaban de sus manos de amianto una y otra vez, sin parar, sin caer nunca, cada vez más rápido, el fuego más y más intenso, más caliente, eran cuatro cometas viajando en la misma órbita, cada uno persiguiendo la estela del otro hasta que lograron morderse las colas y crearon un aro perfecto que encerró el infinito. El agujero por momentos fue negro pero pronto volvió a cambiar a verde.

Fui tragado por la luz, hundiendo hasta el fondo el acelerador.

Juggling translated by rachel schastok

The light changed to red. As I stopped, a ragged clown stepped in front of the car. With movements more hungry than artistic he showed me his hands: nothing here, nothing there. He took four small balls out of his pocket, lit them on fire, and tossed them into the air. The fireballs leapt from his asbestos hands over and over, not stopping or falling, faster and faster, the flames growing hotter and more intense. They were four comets in the same orbit, each following another’s wake before biting its tail to create a perfect loop encircling infinity. The hole was black for a moment but soon turned green.

Swallowed by the light, I put my foot down, hard, on the gas.

Originally published in Contratiempo, a Chicago-based Spanishlanguage literary journal.

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poetry

lovesong keith wilson

this is my grievance: that flowers don’t die fast enough. i had a dream of the cat i had before the breakup. she had grown, somehow. her paws and head made her a new cat and i was a gourd broken-born against the rocks. an ulcer glows slowly, like amber in this house. all the beams are weighed by seasons. all the world is quiet in the snow and seeds that don’t grow are eventually moved over. brown boxes and skin. everything is lightening and floating off and away. like a chia pet, this is the eden god made; without half-trying i kill the good things. christmas, once, was easy. a tree can be barren on the inside, green.

amber sollenberger

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nonfiction

#319: Downtown Brown paul dailing

“I

’m going to take my wife to breakfast,” he said, his first words in about five minutes.

He hadn’t blinked or batted an eye when I asked him to take me twelve miles south to Hyde Park.

Instead, he told me he lived seven blocks from there. He told me he could drop by home and kiss his wife.

“She’d like that,” he said.

Over those winding twelve miles, the cabbie told me this story in bits and chunks through the partition.

All I can vouch for accuracy is that Downtown Brown told me so.

They called him Downtown Brown because he would work the downtown area thirty, forty years ago when the other South Side cabbies stuck to the neighborhoods. The dispatchers teased him, joked that he was goofing off because no one would see him around Woodlawn.

“If you get ten of them together, I bet none of them would know my first name,” he said. “People have asked me ‘What’s your name?’ and I’ve said, ‘Brown.’ ‘Yeah, but what’s your name?’

‘Brown.’ ” Brown was his father’s last name and, by chance, the last name of the stepfather who raised him. Both Brown’s parents would have other children, but the family had a rule: No one could say “half.”

“There was no half-brother, half-sister. He was my brother. She was my sister.”

He grew up playing basketball along 63rd and was pretty good, he said. He would run people out. He would run them up and down the court to wear them down, he said in an elderly, cracking voice. In 1964, he married the wife he still wants to kiss and take to breakfast. He raised her daughter as his own, just like his stepfather raised him. The daughter died a few years

ago.

“At the age of fifty-two,” Brown said.

It got very quiet in the cab.

Brown and his wife had two other children: a daughter who is a minister in Texas and a son who didn’t come up in the story much. At different points, all the children and several of the grandchildren took apartments in the building where Brown and his wife lived, one family spilling through the halls.

When his daughter went to become a minister, she left her own daughter behind. It was a hard decision.

She was scared, but she had been called.

Brown promised to keep his granddaughter from the streets the same way he kept his own three kids. “I told her, ‘I kept you in this cab. I’ll keep her.’ ” He raised his children in the cab, lining them up in the front seat to keep them safe when he couldn’t be home. Sometimes all three would cram up there. Sometimes there would only be one, so he would lay a pillow in his lap so the child could stretch out and doze as Brown took fares.

He did the same thing with the granddaughter.

“She would wake up and say, ‘I love you,’ ” he said, mentioning a sweet nickname she would call him. “And the passengers would be ‘There’s a baby in here!’ They didn’t know. They thought I was crazy. They thought I was talking to myself.”

He laughed.

That granddaughter still lives with Brown and his wife. In the three-flats of Woodlawn, the twenty-sixyear-old lives in her grandparents’ spare room.

Med students need to save their money.

“You must be proud,” I said.

“Oh, I am,” he said, smiling behind the wheel of the cab where he raised a doctor.

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poetry

C

hicago is a city of many names, the subject of many a poem, the recipient of many a love letter, a character in many a story. Here, these young authors—eighth grade students at St. Thomas the Apostle School in Hyde Park—put their reflections on their hometown into verse. With humor and sincerity they try their hands at distilling the essence of the city and their experience of it, as so many writers before them have. Special thanks to Cecily Fultz for compiling these poems.

The Beautiful Darkness alton brooks

Cubs & Sox shirah billups

Kinda a funny concept, When you think about it huh?

How they’re so different yet so alike.

And none are better or worse than any other And when it all comes down like, really comes down, it doesn’t matter the race, the ethnicity, or the gender.

Cubs are just baby Bears Bulls, Bears are as strong as the other and Sox, They’ll keep your feet warm.

III

A tree with branches that expand out With a trunk made of steel, these are ways Chicago is imagined.

It’s a beautiful place don’t get me wrong With all sorts of people whose origins are different And is explained in many different songs.

But, in that beautiful place lies a dark, rude territory The alleys and backstreets is where the real “fun” begins They’re full of twists and turns with smoking grounds.

The deeper you go, the more the lights flicker.

Until you reach a stop, and everything is dark, and in an instant, you vanish into the night.

Chicago... cassandra jeffries

A day walking in Chicago Drive-bys looking into your eyes with shame Once in a while you might hear a bang Saying “Squad!!!”

In my neighborhood they hold up L’s Oh come on sit down no worries You might see fighting, police cars, or drugs being sold Stay safe Bang! Bang!

Did you enjoy your walk in Chicago?

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This War o.a. fraser

This war will be

better than the last one,

and quicker too: A smart, strong war;

It will put the clumsy, old ones to shame.

826CHI is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers nspire their students to write.

We offer tuition-free writing support to more than 3,500 Chicago Public School students each year. To learn more about our programs and apply to volunteer, please visit www.826chi.org

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826CHI // 1276 N Milwaukee Ave // 773.772.8108

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This war won’t litter

our remarkable roadsides,

or foul sacred rivers.

Old men won’t reel their baited hooks

into the mouths of bloated corpses,

eye sockets vacant but for a hermit crab;

faces rotted away,

or eaten by fish that eventually haunt the dinner plate.

This war will be

the last war,

the best war.

Lovers will marvel at its weapons, Name newborns after them:

And such children!

Only too happy To dance in its odorless ashes.

nonfiction

My Son’s Race diane o’neill

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t the Y last week, updating my single membership to a family one, I saw my beige hand writing the word black for my son’s race. Not biracial, not black and white, though that would have been accurate, as he is my biological son and I am Irish American.

I was taken aback. For years, I’ve meticulously referred to my son as biracial, indignant that our society still follows the one-drop rule of slavery.

My son has my eyes, my forehead, my allergies, many of my ways. He often says, “I’m you with a good childhood.”

I’ve read of why Tiger Woods invented a name for his ethnicity that included Asian and white as well as AfricanAmerican—he responded to an interview question simply saying that he wanted to show respect to his mother.

I paused at the Y counter, but I didn’t erase the word “black” or write anything in.

My son and I talk a lot about race, and how it impacts his life. When he walks down the street, people don’t categorize him as biracial; he’s immediately labeled black and treated accordingly.

Just like President Obama in pre-presidential days, when my son walks into a store, he’s followed. When he walks down the street, white women clutch purses. Late at night, walkers switch to a different side of the street. That’s my son’s reality, and as his mother, I guess I’m finally catching up.

Sometimes I think about Trayvon Martin and my son. To paraphrase President Obama, my son could have been Trayvon. He wears hoodies when it’s rainy, he frequents the 7-Eleven in our predominantly white neighborhood, and he sometimes buys iced tea (although rarely Skittles). He sometimes walks late, although usually lis-

tening to a sports podcast rather than chatting on the phone.

I remember thinking, when my son turned fourteen, that that was the age Emmett Till was when he was murdered. Emmett Till was killed the year I was born, yet I was well into adulthood before I even knew his name. Whiteness makes you oblivious to so much, and having black friends and even a

on the way home, my son told me that he’d been a little nervous—if neighbors saw them playing together on the outside porch, they’d be concerned, because my friend’s little girl is white and he is black.

My son accepts his reality. “It’s like when you go outside, you know you need to put on bug spray. Just something you need to be aware of,” he says.

Like all mothers, I have that fierce drive to protect my child from dangers, and racism is a danger.

black husband only taught me so much.

Having a black child, however, wakes you up quickly.

Once, when my son planned to accompany me on my lunch hour walk, I started off ahead, not wanting to be late back to work. When he caught up to me, he said he no longer surprises me by saying “boo,” as he did in younger days. It’s not that he’s grown into more sedate, mature ways—he knows somebody might suspect he was attacking me.

On the day the jury debated the fate of Trayvon’s killer, my son and I were visiting a friend and her fouryear-old daughter. My six-foot-five son played catch with the little girl, allowing himself to be crowned with a pink tiara crown and draped with stuffed toys. Yet,

And he uses humor as a protective shield. Sure, he’s followed into stores all the time, but, “hey, I always have my own personal shopper.” He says he takes pains to be unfailingly polite and never to push ahead of others onto buses; he knows that he will not be forgiven for etiquette breaches.

I think bitterness might have corroded me, but he says there’s no way for me to know—I’m not black, so there’s no way to know how I’d cope. I guess it’s sort of like praising someone in a wheelchair for their “courage.” What choice does the person have? Still, I can’t help it, I admire my son.

I remember, before his prom, giving him “the talk”—reminding him, that if he and his buddies did anything slightly wrong, he’d be the one who’d get in

the most trouble. It was a multi-racial group of buddies—Native American, Chinese, white South African—but my son was the black one, and I was afraid that that would make all the difference.

That if he were stopped by a policeman, to be as polite and genial and compliant as humanly possible, no matter what.

Stuff he already knew, but stuff that as his mother I had to say.

Stuff Trayvon’s mom must have impressed upon him, too. But Zimmerman wasn’t a cop, just a watch commander who had been told by cops to stop following Trayvon. Trayvon went out to buy snacks at a 7-Eleven, wasn’t planning any evil, and yet, just stepping out of his house to get treats caused him to be shot and killed.

Racism exists, but I hear others deny it. As a white mom of a black son, I have a different perspective. Like all mothers, I have that fierce drive to protect my child from dangers, and racism is a danger. When a new teacher, who was white, accused my son of cussing and he insisted that he hadn’t, my first thought was, “Is she racist?” Doesn’t mean I thought my son wore angel’s wings or didn’t want him to face consequences if he had misbehaved—but my racism sensors automatically went into action. When a CTA bus driver challenged his regular bus card, claiming it was stolen, my first question was, “What color was the driver?” If that means I “play the race card,” so be it.

Racism exists.

In preschool, a little girl’s mom told me my son would date her daughter “over her dead body.” The kids were four years old at the time. In kindergarten, his teacher told me she would “tolerate” him; mid-year kindergarten, I transferred him to a different school.

When my son won scholarships in

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nonfiction

later years, his godmother suggested I find that teacher and send her a school newspaper clipping. According to a University of Chicago study from only a few years ago, my son is much less likely to get called in for a job interview simply because he has an AfricanAmerican name.

I can’t get away from my own whiteness, and I know I have racism in me, too. I think every American does.

Racism is part of our national culture; our country was founded on genocide and slavery as much as on ideals of democracy and liberty.

I guess I’ve learned that for a person who is half African-American and half white, identity is complicated—it’s not so much about biological family or being raised in a particular culture, or my son would readily identify himself as Irish-American or biracial. Instead, the treatment he receives solely because of the color of his skin connects him to all other African Americans much more than to people who also have Irish

blood in their veins. All the nurturing and love I’ve given him can’t shield him from racist treatment; it’s something he must and does deal with on his own.

And because of my own light skin, I can never fully understand a huge aspect of my son’s life.

The summer of the Trayvon Martin court hearing, my son and I talked more than usual about race. I asked when he first started noticing racism.

He said he knew from a very early age that other kids could get away with stuff that he couldn’t—that he was looked at differently than other kids, though he didn’t know why. Suddenly a memory flashed back, of sitting on a playground bench and watching my little son in the sandbox and feeling tense, somehow feeling that in any toddler disagreement about sandcastle or shovel, the blonde kid would be viewed as the cute, innocent one, not my darker-skinned child.

Apparently my small child sensed that too, even while building castles.

Communion h.b. kamau

When I walk across the room And I see your shirt thrown over my orderly books I knew you cost me more than I bargained for emptying out my pocket at night I noticed I may have just enough for tomorrow Jesus had his bread and wine but I have your smile to distribute as I walk to the bus stop thankful for the change and the smile I practice communion with the folding of the newspaper lying on the empty seat next to me

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poetry

Fish Sauce h.b. kamau

Going to see my mother in her senior citizen building is like a voyage without any luggage I only have time to shower and collect the crackers and sardines she donates But with pride she tells me Of the birthday cakes she sells And how the women in the building Stand over them and pray She buys her Lotto tickets With the money she earns I tell her how my fingers always stink of fish and she whispers a real man likes the smell of fish on his fingers and I yell back only if he’s grasping a mermaid illustration by nicholas cassleman

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review

Hyde Park Whodunit K.B. Jensen’s Painting with Fire wednesday quansah

K

.B. Jensen’s self-published first novel, Painting with Fire, is something of a murder mystery, but unlike most murder mysteries, it doesn’t boil over right away—it simmers slowly until the last several chapters. It reads as a thought-provoking character study of neighbors in an apartment building who are dealing with issues familiar to many Chicagoans: unemployment, broken school systems, racism, deficient law enforcement, and violence.

Jensen’s goal in incorporating these realistic elements is to get away from the formulas of many conventional murder mysteries—which are often filled with melodrama like ex-secret agents and car chases—and capture what it’s like when a normal person finds a dead body.

It is no coincidence that Painting with Fire’s setting, a three-story walkup brownstone, bears a striking resemblance to many of the residences in Hyde Park. “The characters are in Hyde Park, but not Hyde Park as we know it,” says Jensen. “Fortunately, we don’t have nearly the body count that this [fictional] neighborhood has.”

Jensen draws from other elements in the Hyde Park neighborhood without explicitly setting it there. The characters in Painting with Fire talk about the spot where the Obamas had their first kiss, and the majestically eerie, abandoned church near 57th and Blackstone plays a prominent role as the story unfolds.

Jensen also throws in some of the more humorous aspects of city life. Her main characters are temporarily tortured by a street saxophonist who has more nerve than talent, and who sets up shop on the street outside their window. “There actually was a saxophonist, who I wanted to strangle, outside my window for a couple of months,” Jensen recalls, laughing.

Jensen, who hails from Minneapolis, says she gained a particular insight

have lived if someone had called the police. I wondered about how the body had gotten there, who had killed this person and what it’s like to live next to that kind of violence.”

Using her writing as an outlet, Jensen crafted a fictional explanation where no real answers existed. Painting with Fire was born. The novel opens with the main characters finding a murdered body in the snowbank outside their apartment.

It reads as a thought-provoking character study of neighbors in an apartment building who are dealing with issues familiar to many Chicagoans. into the Chicago area while reporting the crime beat in the southeast suburbs for The Times of Northwest Indiana.

One case in particular stuck in her mind.

“There was a body found in a snowbank in someone’s backyard. I interviewed people in the neighborhood, and a lot of people heard shots but didn’t call the police. There were no answers and the killer was never caught.

It bothered me that this person might

In publishing her novel, Jensen took a route that is growing in popularity among authors—she self-published through Amazon, under the name Crimson Cloud Media. “It’s been a trip, and it’s been fun,” she says of the process. “I was in charge of everything, and I learned how to do layout, formatting, editing, and marketing, which is the hardest part. You have to switch from writer to entrepreneur.”

Even though Jensen is not opposed

to the methods of larger publishing houses, she appreciates that Amazon is an accessible way for a new author to get exposure for her work. “Amazon lets you have free giveaway days, and I was able to give my book to 11,000 people.

That’s 11,000 people who are reading my work who wouldn’t be if I was waiting around for an agent.”

Offering advice for beginning writers, Jensen says: “Don’t write when you don’t want to write, but the trick is actually writing when you want to write.”

Painting with Fire took her four years to complete; she often wrote while her infant daughter, who is now five, was napping.

Friends and family have asked Jensen if she might write a sequel to Painting with Fire, but she isn’t sure yet. Right now her focus is on a book of short stories. The premise of the collection, currently unnamed, involves a woman driving in rural Wisconsin who hits a hitchhiker. The two end up trapped in the car together, exchanging stories to pass the time. When I ask Jensen if, like Painting with Fire, this book was based on experiences from her life, she assures me that she has never hit a hitchhiker with her car.

K.B. Jensen, Painting with Fire.

Crimson Cloud Media. ebook.

209 pages.

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fiction

Stop and Frisk tony lindsay

T

he night before, when he came home after school and work, Randy had been tired. He had taken his first midterm exam on the college level, and this morning he felt good about the unknown results. The English test had been difficult, but he’d studied hard the weeks prior and the night before. He was certain he’d get a good grade. This confidence had him smiling while he waited for the bus.

Most of his buddies and some of the people he worked with said he was wasting his time going to school.

“Man, the dice have already been rolled for black dudes like us,” said his oldest friend Jacob. “It’s messenger, cabby, restaurants, janitor, or the streets.

That is where dudes like us get our money.”

That’s what Jacob had told Randy when he went to the G.E.D. program offered through the library. When he fished the program and passed the test, Jacob told him, “Man, you tripping, if you think the white man got anything for you but jail.”

What Randy saw around him agreed with Jacob; most of their friends, their brothers, and their fathers had done time in jail, but Randy knew black men did live without jail. He saw them in the subway, on buses, and he watched them going to work at jobs that weren’t on street corners. The first time he’d voted, he’d helped one become president of the United States. Last night’s test, like passing the G.E.D. exam, had made Randy think Jacob was more wrong than right.

Today he has to work seven hours inside the golden arches before he goes

to school. The sun isn’t up, but he and six other people at the bus stop were.

He yawns and adjusts his book bag on his shoulder.

“Now cut that out, young blood, you know those are contagious,” says Mr. Peters. “I see you yawning then Imma start, and the next you know Imma think about going back up stairs, calling in, and getting back in my bed

let Mr. Peters have his little fantasy. He can dream about going back upstairs if he wants to.”

“I ain’t dreamin’,” Mr. Peters huffs.

I am a grown man. I can go back upstairs if I want to.” The brakes on the bus squeal as it comes to a stop in front of the crowd. “But I don’t want to,” he says, climbing the stairs. “Mornin’ Malcolm,” he says to the driver.

“Randy, it is too early for all that truth this morning,” one of them snickers. next to the Mrs.” Randy laughs and shakes his head no. “Mr. Peters, who are you trying to fool?” he says. “There are two things that are stopping that from happening. First, you haven’t missed a day of work in twenty-three as you have told me many times over these three months that I have been catching the bus with you. And second, Mrs. Peters just finished her shift at the hospital, and she is not about to have you coming back in the bed disturbing her rest. So, sir, I am going to keep on yawning, and you can join me if you want, but that bus coming up the avenue has a seat for you just like it does everybody else out here.”

The two ladies standing behind them start laughing too. “Randy, it is too early for all that truth this morning,” one of them snickers. “You should

“Good morning, Mr. Peters. When are you going to let the ladies on first?”

“When they get out here first,” Mr. Peters answers, flashing his bus pass.

Randy, who has stepped aside to allow the ladies to enter, sees police squad car lights approaching the bus.

His stomach tightens and flips. He wishes he had got on the bus first like Mr. Peters. The squad car blocks the bus and puts a spotlight on those remaining outside of it.

“Hey, you with the bookbag, hold it right there!” comes from the speaker of the squad car.

Randy takes a step toward the door of the bus.

“I said hold it!”

He stops, and the others walk past him, boarding the bus. He would have done the same in their position. No one

wants a hassle with the police.

Both officers are out of the car approaching him. One has drawn his pistol.

“Step away from the bus.”

Randy does.

“What’s in the book bag?”

The officer with his pistol holstered asks.

“Books and my lunch.”

“Books? Drop it to the ground.”

Randy lets the book bag fall from his shoulder to the ground. When he does, the officer with the holstered gun is upon him. He trips Randy to the ground, causing his chin to hit the sidewalk, which forces his teeth into his tongue. His mouth fills with blood. The officer handcuffs him while his partner goes through Randy’s book bag. The officer who cuffed him searches through his pockets. He has stripped off Randy’s shoes and socks and is going through both. Finding nothing, he puts on latex gloves and forces his hand down the back of Randy’s pants and around to his crotch area. Randy is still laying facedown on the sidewalk.

“Anything in the book bag?” He yells to his partner.

“Just books and a sandwich.”

The officer who searched Randy un-cuffs him. The other officer throws his book bag to him. They return to their squad car and pull off, allowing the bus to leave. Just then, behind the bus, Jacob pulls up in his Chevy with the music blaring.

The bus driver calls, “Randy?”

Randy sits up, spits out blood and then stands. He waves the bus on and walks to the Chevy.

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Lit Below the Loop by jamie mermelstein

Across 1. The fuzz 5. 2013 novel by Blue Balliett 13. Oral statement 14. Legal eagle 15. “Me, Myself, and _____”

16. Facts and figures 18. Brew from Holland 20. Brooklyn athlete 21. Sun, in Spain 22. 1940 Richard Wright novel 24. Girl Scout cookie 26. 2013 mixtape by The Game 27. Sixth sense, abbr.

28. _____ in years 29. “Star Wars” princess 31. Things you have 34. 1959 Lorraine Hansberry play 40. Child star Fanning 41. 26 for Fe, abbr.

42. “_____ a dream” 44. Turntable speed, abbr.

47. Poet add-on 48. Stupid 49. 1906 Upton Sinclair novel 52. Score in baseball 53. Woolly mama 54. Pollen producer 55. End of many Vegas marriages 59. EZ-Pass analog 60. Fried seafood delicacy 61. Hairs on a catapillar 62. 2014 book by Thomas Bauman 63. Sir’s counterpart Down 1. Kia or GM 2. Tragic trilogy 3. Sophia Loren’s husband Carlo 4. Location of a sentimental heart 5. Prince in “Henry IV” 6. Season with octubre

7. U.S. Army rank 8. Nike slogan, with “just” 9. Priests, abbr.

10. Unwelcome picnic guest 11. Earthquake prefix 12. PC game “Rollercoaster _____” 13. Automated ivories 17. 1970s radical extremist org.

19. “_____ Miserables” 23. Actor Joe or Vincent 24. Actor Rogen or Green 25. Sailing, say 28. Obtain 30. Quinn, of film 32. Dog command 33. Part of a kit 35. Keep 36. Mike & _____ 37. Wounds of Christ 38. He wants you!

39. Makes _____ (gibberish) 42. Rub with ointment 43. “_____ and her Sisters” 45. Sleepwear, abbr.

46. Inability to speak 48. Glass, of NPR 49. Change just a bit 50. Artist Matisse 51. Nymph, of Greek lore 53. Palindromic fashion model 56. Suffix for glob or gran 57. Pup’s perch?

58. Like the Wizard’s heartless visitor

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