Praise for A People’s History of Chicago

“I just read your new manuscript and got the same feeling I had some weeks ago when I was back in Chicago in a cab very early in the morning on my way to catch a train, the city shrouded in a misty rain, and as we passed what has always been one of my favorite historic intersections by the river at michigan and wacker (where once long long ago the freshly created soul of jazz poured out of the London House) there was this fucking sign, TRUMP, like an obscenity scrawled across chicago history, illuminated like a raw scar.  There’s that sense to your book, the scars of how the city was made are part of the architecture, of the landscape.”

—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

“The stories and personalities memorialized in these poems are real to me. Poet Kevin Coval breathes them back alive with word-pictures both concrete and passionate, compressing centuries into verse. These are poems to be savored. I’d be hard-pressed to pick just one favorite from this remarkable collection.”

—Timuel D. Black, Chicago historian/activist/teacher, author of Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration

“Kevin Coval has given us a gift, a collection of heartfelt, piercing poems, stories really, about America’s city. Taken together, these song-like postcards are a kind of celebration, as well as some takedowns, of those who sweat and struggle and endure to make this city a better place. The book soars.”

—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here and Never a City So Real

“From our first resident, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, to the immigrants, migrants, and souls who make this city great, a vibrant, dynamic collection of vignettes that expose the naked truth of our fair city.”

—Karen Lewis, teacher and president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Local 1

“Kevin Coval is a dazzling, dizzying time traveler and cultural historian-poet. He is a lover of language, rhythms, and colors and the people who transform in these. He knows the stories of Chicago and all its people—Red, Black, White, Brown, Asian, Queer, Straight. The spine of this book is the people’s resistance and struggle for justice and a fair shake. But—not to worry—Kevin puts it all to you so sweetly, so energetically, so for real—he makes you smile behind poem after poem. And then again he makes you want to rise up. He’s in the Chicago tradition—fire, earth, and endless blues.”

—Angela Jackson, author of Where I Must Go, winner of the American Book Award

A

PEOPLE’S

HISTORY

OF

CHICAGO

   

Kevin Coval

Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

© 2017 Kevin Coval

Published in 2017 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

info@haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-766-2

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover design by Brett Nieman. Cover photograph by Bob Simpson of a July 2016 sit-in and march against police violence initiated by four teenage women, which was punctuated by periods of silence and performances of poetry.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

—Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Contents

Foreword by Chance the Rapper

Shikaakwa

lasalle Wrote It Down Wrong

The Father Is a Black Man

The Treaty of Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World

Albert Parsons Can Hang

How to Be Down

The L Gets Open

The white City

Eugene Debs Reads Marx in Prison

Reversing the Flow of the Chicago River

The Great Migration

The Eastland Disaster

The Murder of Eugene Williams

Society for Human Rights (America’s First Gay Rights Organization)

Thomas Dorsey, Gospel’s Daddy

Gwendolyn Brooks Stands in the Mecca

Hansberry vs. Lee

Muddy Waters Goes Electric

Nelson Algren Meets Simone de Beauvoir at the Palmer House

Pickle with a Peppermint Stick

Sun Ra Becomes a Synthesizer

hugh hefner, a Play Boy

Mamie Till Bears the Movement

king daley Unfurls His burnham Plan

The Division Street Riots

Martin Luther King Prays in Marquette Park

Studs Terkel Drops a Mixtape

Carl Sandburg Village (Where My Parents Met)

Wall of Respect

AfriCOBRA

The Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton

Don L. Lee Becomes Haki Madhubuti

The Chicago 21 Plan

Leaving Aldine

Ode to Steppin

Disco Demolition

mayor byrne Moves Into & Out of Cabrini Green

Ron Hardy Plays the Record Backwards

The Assassination of Rudy Lozano

Marc Smith Invents the Poetry Slam

Collateral Damage

The Day Harold Died

Patronage

Fresh to Death

Molemen Beat Tapes

Graffiti Blasters: An Erasure (A Buff)

The Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act

The Etymology of Chicago Joe

Common’s Resurrection

The Supreme Court Makes Color Illegal

Erasing the Green

Ida B. Wells Testifies in the Ghost Town

How to Teach Poetry in Chicago Public Schools

Lenard Clark Pedals for Air

Baby Come On: An Ode to Footwork

A Moratorium on the Death Penalty

Praise the House Party

Día de las Madres

Kanye Says What’s on Everybody’s Mind

I Wasn’t in Grant Park when obama Was Elected

Republic Windows Workers Sit In

The Night the Modern Wing Was Bombed

When King Louie First Heard the Word Chiraq

An Elegy for Dr. Margaret Burroughs

A Dedication to the Inaugural Poet

Memoir of the Red X

Chief Keef’s Epiphany at Lollapalooza

Teachers’ Strike in the Chicago Tradition

During Ramadan the Gates of Heaven Are Open

Ms. Devine Explains the Meaning of Modern Art: A Found Poem

Two Cities Celebrate Independence Day

We Charge Genocide

Atoning for the Neoliberal in All

or rahm emanuel as the Chicken on Kapparot

400 Days

The Night the Cubs Win the World Series

Chicago Has My Heart

Notes

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgments

Foreword

We got the cheat codes.

There’s no other place on earth where you can go to a centralized space and see thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-olds who want to conquer art and music. I left Chicago for a little and went to LA. But have you ever seen a raw-ass tree or a raw-ass plant that’s beautiful, that’s fully bloomed and growing? It can’t fully bloom if you uproot it. If you take it somewhere else, out of its natural environment, it’s not gonna grow the same way. If you take a tree out of the dirt, a Christmas tree, and move it into your crib, it’ll stay that exact same tree for a little while before it starts to wilt, but it won’t grow anymore. You can’t uproot a plant. You have to let it grow. If I were to have grown in LA, I might’ve grown into some shit I’m not supposed to be or just not grown at all, or just peaked. I can reach my peak in Chicago cuz that’s where I was planted and where I can continue to grow.

I had planned on living in LA, but when I was out there going to parties and feeling that vibe, I thought it was ungodly, it wasn’t true to who I was born to be or what I was supposed to grow to be. Being there made me realize this is not where I’m supposed to get my biggest experiences. As sad as I ever was in LA, the lowest I’ve ever been, it’s not where my lowest was supposed to be. The highest I’ve been, the happiest I’ve been in Los Angeles, was not where my life’s happiest moments were supposed to be. Being happy means doing what you are supposed to do, being exactly who you are supposed to be. My god, my inner understanding, whatever it is that guides me, had me recognizing that I’m not supposed to be there.

We have a head start. If you’ve been in that building once, in the Harold Washington Library, one time, you know. Harold Washington. The first Black mayor of Chicago. A very powerful man. A very connected man. A very humble and grounded man. A household name who died in office while at work. His library is in the center of downtown, in the center of the Loop, where all the trains meet. For us to walk into that building is astounding. My dad volunteered for Harold Washington. That’s how he got his record expunged. That’s how he dodged the system. Years later, he has a library named after him and I could walk in from the cold and experience this temple.

From the age of fourteen, I was trying to go against the grain, to grow into a time and period where it’s dope to be anti-establishment, where it’s dope to not just accept all the answers that are given to you but to look for your own answers. I am trying to push that. I’m trying to push that to other people who didn’t get taught that. As kids that grew up in the’90s and early 2000s, we are able to ask questions like What’s going on? Who are the people leading us? Who are those people teaching us? What are they telling us? How are they able to tell us that? Who are they and where are they coming from and is it the truth? I’ve been taught to be a critical thinker, and I was able to say this doesn’t feel right. Having the understanding I’ve been blessed with, I’ve been able to discern that that shit is not right, that it doesn’t feel right, that it doesn’t seem right.

I met Kevin Coval at an orientation at Jones College Prep, the first time I ever went into my high school cuz I didn’t check it out beforehand. I just signed up for it and applied. So my first time going up to the school was for the Louder Than A Bomb team orientation and Kevin was doing a writing workshop. Though I didn’t make my slam team or to Louder Than A Bomb, Kevin ended up being very instrumental to me.

Kevin Coval is my artistic father. He mentored my friends Malcolm London and Dimress Dunnigan and Fatimah Warner and got me shows, and those shows got me a little bit of bread and the confidence to continue and take the craft seriously. In a lot of ways he was the other side of Brother Mike for me, and anybody from Chicago knows what that means and how big a statement that is. He was that for me and for a lot of people.

Kevin made art a job to me. He made me feel like it was real. He made me feel like the competition was real. He made me feel that the money was real. He made me feel that the love and the fans were real. And if I didn’t have him in my life I would’ve been complacent. He took me out of that space and made me understand what it is to be a poet, what it is to be an artist, and what it is to serve the people.

Chance the Rapper

Chance the Chicagoan

Shikaakwa

before 1492

sea of tall grass. sky quiet

enough to hear yourself think.

ancestors talk shit where the wind

whips brisk from the lake. the face

of the river ripples. land of marsh.

before the steel plow

& forced removal

this was shikaakwa:

wild leek, onion, garlic. a great

trade center, hundreds of tribes

canoed to the portage to barter fish

& skins, squash & bone, mix languages

& blood: home of Chippewa, Potawatomi

Kickapoo, Ho-Chunk, Ottawa, Miami, Ioway

Sauk, Fox, Blackhawk, Odawa & Illinois.

thousands of years before joliet, lasalle

daley, podmajersky, before tribes were razed,

lakes polluted, the blood diseased, the people

rounded into prisons, reservations, Maywood.

there were ash trees, elms & basswood, oak

hickory. history was stories your elders sang.

the young danced rain & memory awake.

there were thousands, before. this land, a sacred

burial ground, a people we delete.

quiet

before your morning paper

put your ear to the earth

hear the terror of the horses

the wails of the hunters

howling in this city of wind

on this land of skunk, the stench

of blood inescapable.

lasalle Wrote It Down Wrong

1687

gringoed the whole place.

every street & building some flat

mispronunciation, some misshapen

mouth                some murder.

Chicagua wild

garlic in indigenous

utterance.          some funk

music.                some rampant weed

returning, perennial & persistent.

Chicago is malignant, a mass

of machinery built upon mass graves.

the beginning of a long death march.

an inadequate water

down. an erasure, an eraser

pink as the whiteman’s tongue.

The Father Is a Black Man

1779

There is not a single street in the city of Chicago named in honor of the Black man who founded this city, not an alley...but John Kinzie, a white man, who came after DuSable, when DuSable was forced out or pushed out or whatever, he ended up with DuSable’s property, and Kinzie has a bridge, Kinzie has a street, Kinzie has a building, and all he did was buy DuSable’s house.

Lerone Bennett, Jr.

the father is mixed. the father is Black.

his mother a slave. his father a french

mariner. the first non-Native

to settle in Chicago

Jean Baptiste Point duSable

was a hustler.

he worked the trap.

traded pelts at the frontier.

married Kittihawa

a Potawatomi woman

he saw sailing the Mississippi.

the traditional ceremony

officiated by a Chief.

the father was cool

with the Indigenous.

they settled at the mouth

of the river, where the tribune sits

spewing untruths in english.

DuSable spoke spanish, french, english

& several Native dialects.

the father a genius.

he made okra & oxtails

with sos pwa noir, a black bean

sauce, & joumou, a pumpkin stew

harvested from the acres he farmed.

his house had a large stone fireplace

a piano, a garden & orchard.

he collected paintings, mirrors

& walnut furniture.

the father had style

and maybe some gators.

he finessed pesos, pounds & francs

from folks traveling thru town, down

the river, out west or back east. he stayed

serving. awash in wampums. the father was ballin.

his granddaughter, the first non-Native born

in Chicago, was mixed. the first child was mixed.

the father, a product

of terror & rape.

the father, the city

forgets, is mixed

the mix made the British

nervous. a body protestants

couldn’t wrap their heads around.

the father is a Black man

pushed out by a white man

rich & thirsty.

DuSable left to die

far from the city

built with his hands.

his mixed hands.

his Black hands.

the father is a Black man.

The Treaty of Chicago

September 26, 1833[1]

Our land has been wasting away ever since the white people became our neighbors, and we have now hardly enough left to cover the bones of our tribe.

(Potawatomi) Chief Metea

getting the Chiefs to sign

wouldn’t be easy. in 1795

the Greenville treaty stole

six miles around the mouth

of the River. city of long cons

fire & fine print. the fight

at Fort Dearborn whites wouldn’t

forget, when the Miami tribe

embarrassed the fumbling army

of dumb settlers in fifteen minutes

to take back Roosevelt & Michigan

land simply called earth then.

but this’ll be the last time

the indigenous dance at the waterway

connecting the Mississippi to the Great Lakes,

a trade post between the Caribbean & New York.

the perfect nexus for whiskey & unbridled capitalism.

this town, such desirable waterfront property

the government will kill to own it.

the pioneers plied Chiefs

all night with bourbon. under intoxication

duress & gun powder, under disease

& white power, in english, an illiterate theft.

they marked the parchment, X

Hog Butcher for the World

December 25, 1865[2]

grid of flesh. source

of labor & meal & mayhem.

cutting edge ingenuity to maim

& murder. a grand dis-assembly

line. innovator of the killing wheel.

steak knife. craver of cattle

earth. neighborhoods gutted. chest

opened by a butcher

block

by block. dissected

like 7th grade science / class.

Chicago is a frog.

Chicago is a pig              fetus

splayed & separated

segregated

from its body

politic.

white meat                     dark.

an experiment the country watches

& repeats.

town of                                    viaducts

blvd                                         motes.

turf wars                                 & stop signs.

one ways                    & circuitous routes.

folks                           & people.

a park

in between.

a metra train.

eminent domain.

the body

quartered.          broken

down

somewhere.

a blueprint                                            picked over

refined.              a carcass

city

of scraps

& sausage.

Albert Parsons Can Hang

November 11, 1887

Lay bare the inequities of capitalism; expose the slavery of law; proclaim the tyranny of government; denounce the greed, cruelty, abominations of the privileged class.

Albert Parsons[3]

a dumb kid of privilege.

a son of the south.

a descendant of the american revolution.

as a boy, he fought with the confederates.

as a man, he apologized to the Black woman who raised him.

a lover of Lucy,

part Mestizo & Black radical socialist,

more dangerous than a thousand rioters.

a typesetter like my grandfather.

a believer in the rights of the worker.

an 8-hour day & 8 to sleep & 8 to play.

a ringer of the alarm.

a white tiger, before Huey, maybe

dynamite, Jimmie Walker

an organizer in the good times

summer sunday beer gardens.

a longing for bread or blood.

a leader in the rise of the working class.

a target the barons went after.

an albatross to the merchant prince marshall field.

a defendant in the Haymarket Riot

no evidence, no fair jury

railroaded by george pullman.

Albert Parsons

a white man to become

a white man who acted

a white man unbound

by guilt or other bullshit

a prisoner in cell 29

a writer, live from death row.

How to Be Down

September 18, 1889

Jane Addams from rural Cedarville.

originated in loot & leisure. got shook

the world wasn’t like that for all

so she built a table, a house, not perfect

but bout it bout it. her living room big

enough for the whole West Side. kneading

culture as bread & spaghetti eventually

& kindergarten too & garbage pickup

& public parks, a place for immigrants

& a place for Benny Goodman to swing

& Upton Sinclair to report, & W. E. B. Du Bois

to prophesy. a place for Ida B. Wells to debate

& educate Ellen Gates Starr, Florence Kelley

Alice Hamilton, this squad of white women

led by a squat Queer woman. how odd indeed.

how down

she be.

The L Gets Open

June 6, 1892

the loop would be next.

for now a line, a track

one neighborhood                                    to another.

magic. transit. a new                      street

different block.                            the ethnic lock

picked

by a steam engine          a camel

thru the eye

of a needle.

viaduct                                      crosser. 39th Street

to Congress

31 blocks.

a working

class

spaceship                     to fly

above

ground

& borders.

all                   city

ours.

The white City

May 1, 1893

the world’s fair turned the swamp

utopian lie. classical architecture

a garish nod to old ass empire,

made the poet of steel, Louis Sullivan,

mourn the buildings businessmen

desired to show off. all bluster

& facade. all fronts. the white city

meant to distract, erase the Black

city of smoke & sky, grime & grind.

faces that gutted the land, made it run,

banned, pushed to the side. the face

the city presented to tourists, miles

of magnificence millionaires wanted

out-of-towners to whisper about

on the train trip home. a museum

prison Houdini tried escaping.

fraudulent city of the future built

from scratch, from scraps, hidden

the hands that scraped. beneath

the veneer lurked murder. silent

terror behind white construction.

Eugene Debs Reads Marx in Prison

1895

like Malcolm, memorized the dictionary.

Nature does not produce[4] subjugated

steps. every eve he’d walk the yard

breathing beneath night’s curtain.

the free sky etched into his head. on the one side

owners of money or commodities, on the other men

possessing nothing but their own labour-power

contemplating ways to counter empire.

in midnight’s throne, this relation has no natural basis.

like the imagination, the heavens spread

common to all historical periods, pages lit

by moon turn. liberated from these walls

he’ll walk, waving a new, red banner.

Reversing the Flow of the Chicago River

January 2, 1900

there’s shit in the water.

to avoid typhoid fever

an engineering miracle

on par with the pyramids.

canal & quarry men lost

their lives & didn’t get credit

or fair compensation. before

it’s over Governor Altgeld calls

the national guard to kill some on strike.

but today

Chicago does the impossible.

reverses the flow away

from the great lake michigan

toward the des plaines river

& lockport: this very moment

a man-made nile, a diversion

of millions         of gallons.

by crane & crook

neck, backs breaking rock.

millennia of earth blown with dynamite.

the grit of workers carved a path, bent

the south branch & main stem.

dug 28 miles of canal in the long

purple dusk of a new century.

the sweat & calloused hands

of 8,500 men did the impossible:

shifted the norm

for the health of the young

metropolis. immigrant men

a force, to counter the natural system

so the city          could survive.

The Great Migration

1915–1950

No longer do our lives depend upon the soil, the sun, the rain or the wind; we live by the grace of jobs and the brutal logic of jobs.

Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices

The Defender said come: here

is a promised     land. fill the factories.

the train travels north. leaves at dusk.

leaves the Delta. the train forward

lurches where earth hardens into sky

rises into steel. still Black in the 8 hours

(at least) of chaos. here accents foreign

fast. a’s stretch like restrictive covenants

circling Bronzeville. the city builds heaven

for a few. tenements for most. a project

to carve a moment of quiet in the roar

& rumble of machine. lines more rigid

by the minute. lines visible & not;

at the beach, on the train, schools

banks. lines shift, sharpen, root thick.

blueprint into bars: which ones to go

into & not. neighborhoods demarcated

sounds nothing like democracy. separate

& nothing equal. sections. housing

authorities. prisons, windows open

air, industrial, capital, labor under

a different overseer, a different punch

clock. in, off hours, invent in the domestic

space with wares brought from the south

the other side of the atlantic, made electric,

sped up & swinging, Jack Johnson. A. Philip

Randolph will rise from this earth;

a Black mayor, a Black president.

everything will change & nothing will

The Eastland Disaster

July 24, 1915

Grim industrial feudalism stands with dripping and red hands behind the whole Eastland affair.

Carl Sandburg

saturday morning, at 6:30 am

western electric workers were ordered

to be on time & dress their best

at the wharf. too poor for holiday

they scrambled in excitement: packed

day bags & made sure dirt disappeared

from their children’s faces & fingernails.

the company men would travel to Michigan City

by carriage & the mighty Eastland would carry

secretaries, bean counters, ledger keepers & factory

workers across the great blue body of lake.

the boat’d had problems before.

no one seemed to care. it was

top-heavy like the economy,

the hubris of the city’s

over-fed owners.

an hour in, the ship shifted

twenty feet from the shore.

in the middle of the Chicago

river, the boat turned, a whale

of metal flipping on its belly.

hundreds fell from the open

upper deck like drunken pigeons.

hundreds trapped in rooms

beneath, crushed by dead pianos

& falling furniture. mouths stuffed

with gallons of roaring river water

844 people, mostly immigrants

mostly workers died in the Eastland.

my great-grandmother among them.

after my grandfather turned

bastard & stalked the north side

with a two-by-four on his shoulder

like the city owed him something

& it did.

The Murder of Eugene Williams

July 27, 1919

the summer was hot as hell.

for relief, his boys brought a raft

to the beach at 25th Street the whole

city’s body laid out on water.

lake michigan’s powerful current

dragged the raft a few blocks south

a/cross an invisible line in the water.

at 29th Street rocks flew. launched

from white hands on land

they thought theirs alone, to own.

one rocked the temple of Eugene, 17,

off the raft. he drowned in the body

at the bottom of the lake.

& again water graves claim Black

& again white police refuse to arrest

& again white gangs rally

from bridgeport, back of the yards.

white gangs like the hamburgs

like richie daley’s crew, like the future

mayors

.

Society for Human Rights

(America’s First Gay Rights Organization)

December 10, 1924

at 17, the boy’s admitted

into an insane asylum.

institution of electroshock

& hallucinogens, white coats

& sodomy laws. the state

not separated from the church.

they wanted the devil out. he became

double-O seven. shaken & stirred

to action.

Henry Gerber wasn’t his name.

a german immigrant boy hiding

in america’s skirt. told to meld into

the heteronorm. the boy made illegal.

his fatherland wrote paragraph 175[5]

the bible an arm against him. an outlaw.

an outcast                would go crazy.

he called a community

together. organized a society

in secret. a space for men to gather

in his home in old town, untouched

by the fear of being found out

& detained & shamed.

John Graves, a Black minister

whose partner was a Pullman porter,

his friend, comrade & confidant signed

the papers to become the first

president of the first organization

in the dumb country, in the young city

45 years before stonewall. Black & White

Chicago men mustered a congregation

until they couldn’t

until Henry Gerber was fired from his post

office job, arrested, tried three times & lost

his life savings.

he’d go underground, go pseudonym

write newsletter Connection chronicles

from lone apartment bunkers, advocating

for the safety of his being & the being

of those like him & the country being ok

with his being & those like him & the city

country being greater because of it.

Thomas Dorsey, Gospel’s Daddy

1932

before the unspeakable

he was Georgia Tom on the road

with Ma Rainey, a raunchy hit maker

seven million records sold.

then his wife Nettie died

in labor. his son two days later.

grief is an unshakeable shelter.

like Coltrane composing Love

Supreme in his child’s afterglow

Dorsey took to song to mourn

channeled the spirit of rhythm

& blues in juke & segregated joints.

he harnessed the secular

for the sanctified. Take My Hand,

Precious Lord the genesis. gospel

called Dorsey’s. praise

with piano & tambourine, returning

Black Jesus to the choir, to the ladies

of the church to raise & transform

him, white & stiff on the cross

as he was, into a movement Dr. King

messed with. no one wanted to

publish the songs he sang. so

he made his own label: House

of Music; independent, divine. self

-determined. tryin to run the devil

out; white, blue-eyed or otherwise.

Gwendolyn Brooks Stands in the Mecca

1936

I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. There was my material.

Gwendolyn Brooks

she slang snake oils

at 19. her small hands

moving love potions

out bottles for some kind

of doctor. stalking halls

listening to the masses

stuffed in kitchenettes.

blocks of brick. floors

of Black lives. every

day people fighting

& fucking & struggling

to make it. sometimes

they didn’t. nose ripe

with onion fumes

rising like the people’s

will in the warpland.

she took rich snapshots

of the poor. some rhythm

rattling around her head.

each sound an ornament:

a key turning the tumbler,

faucets praising the body

with lukewarm water,

the laughter of kids

& criminals. the lost

girls. she kept count

of them, each syllable

stuck in a handbag

in her head, waiting

til she got home

to lay every precious

note on the table

right in front of her

nose, the tiny gems

she’d gather thru

the day, all

the ingredients

she’d need to sit

& begin to write

a new literature,

a new world.

Hansberry vs. Lee

November 12, 1940

american racism helped kill him

Lorraine Hansberry

her father knew a good deal

when he saw it. a real estate

man building a Black belt

in Bronzeville growing

like a belly spilling into Woodlawn.

the whites got to clutching their pearls.

built picket fences taller, whiter. guarded

them with ordinances nobody voted for

& bombs that burst in Black homes freely

as the 4th of July.

Carl stayed strapped

with lawyers, reading endless court documents

in the wee hours under dimming light

& the coming dawn. Du Bois & Robeson

ate in the kitchen when they were in town

encouraging him to fight & bust the barriers down

all the way up                to the supreme court

he went.

& little Lorraine,

ten years old at betsy ross

elementary, listened in the corner

with Langston in her lap,

taking notes the whole

time, writing down her father’s face

how it sagged, sad, what he said.

his wrestling & anguish. her diary

became the first Black woman

on broadway, the great white way.

the story of her daddy’s fight, how even

victory is death for Black men

in america.

Muddy Waters Goes Electric

1945

bars & rent parties roar. motherfuckers won’t shut up.

the acoustic guitar’s an impotent whimper in the throat

of war machines. some country shit won’t cut it.

Muddy slick, like his hair, like the puddles & creeks

he played in, in Clarksdale.         a long way

from sharecropping & his dead mama.

he drives a truck delivering venetian blinds & works

a paper mill making lumber lay like linen.

Uncle Joe got him an ax with fangs. he plugged in

& shook fire out. the amp spit licks that wrapped

around necks of macks talkin weak game & zip.

fuck a pick, it remind him too much of Mississippi.

pluck this metal with hands that worked the earth,

that call folk home & throw them thru the future

out a plate glass window. he a conjured a time

machine.

(white boys tried to it pick up

but couldn’t access its Black magic. clapton,

a poor mimic. the stones, a colonial bore.)

McKinley Morganfield sits up on a stool

around 43rd Street & shoots lightning out

his fingers, a jolt thru the city. he makes

the blues jump. he shocks the world.

Nelson Algren Meets Simone de Beauvoir at the Palmer House

February 21, 1947

beneath ornate ceilings, in the grand room

on plush cushions, they drank martinis

he couldn’t stomach & she didn’t understand

a word he said. he thought she looked

like a french school teacher, a good-lookin one

who in a few days he’d read about in

the new yorker. he’s a different sort, she thought.

not like the men she’d tolerate in the parisian cafe society,

high-minded intellectuals who’d rather talk than lust.

she returned in april. he took her

to the polish bars in wicker park,

to his apartment without a bathroom,

garbage piling in the alleys. he’d show

her a jail, the electric chair, men strung

on heroin. a city/country taking it

on the chin. he had a chip

on his shoulder, a second city complex.

she’s a modern wave french Feminist.

the loved, lauded, chic Queen of the existentialists.

he’s a Chicago artist cursed in the middle, unappreciated

in a moment McCarthy will try to ban his realism & wit.

she loved his grit, the precision of craft

honed thru years of devotion. the gift

of pen & more. he made her come

to his city again & for the first time.

they were destined

to nose dive. be out

of reach. an impossible

bird & bear bound

to the cities that made them.

Algren died without anyone

claiming his body. his heart

attacking minutes after

a reporter asked of her.

de Beauvoir was buried

alongside Sartre in Paris

but bore Algren’s silver

ring on her bone, forever.

Pickle with a Peppermint Stick

white flight after World War II, 1948–1978

Integration is the period between the arrival of the first Black and the departure of the last white.

Saul Alinsky

is some

Maxwell Street hold over.

brine, tangy. crisp since 1898

when the first wave of immigrant

jews slid safe from europe & made

shtetls. schmattas tied over the wide

hips of Bubbes preparing vegetables

for the hawk & long winter ahead. a

pickle’s perfect for lunch, some snack

out a jar: garlic, peppercorn & dill.

enterprise young hustler. henry ford

off the block. out the hood. innovate.

dream america in the trunk & church

of the dollar. amass. mass produce in

plastic. produce plastic. exit the shtetl

for the shrubs of the suburbs. leave relics

in the corner store. leave poor, darker new

immigrants behind in the corner store. leave

something for them to suck on. the South Side

became the new north, became the old south.

Harriet’s railroad stopped too soon. shtetls

grew ghettos. Blacks from the south, stopped

on the stoop, but the stoop already claimed.

the corner already owned by someone else.

Jim Crow lives here too. the sour too much

to take after coming all that way. the north

promised roads of gold & bellies of milk.

salt & vinegar too much bitter to swallow.

too much history to inherit & repeat.

the peppermint stick is some sweet/ness

to help america go down. some castor

oil & BBQ. some addition & innovation

kids with hot tongues playing with fire

demanded for fun, a change of pace &

palate they shanked the pickle with

a peppermint stick like a vd exam.

something here is sick & burning.

here’s some cool to extinguish

the fire, some mint to ease

all this funk.

Sun Ra Becomes a Synthesizer

October 20, 1952

I’m not a minister, I’m not a philosopher, I’m not a politician, I’m in another category.

-Sun Ra

thecollegedropoutconscientiousobjector

EgyptologistBlackfuturistGarveyiteoccultist

interplanetarytranshistoricalorator. at night

he played bump & grind in Cal City strip clubs

but in the small apartment in Washington Park

he learned to synthesize: Themi research, race

etymologist fusing ideas & tone in dissonance

& modality. minor, major sound effects to swing

to rocket fly towards an Afro-Future. wheeling

mimeographed dissertations on 55th Street

politicking with Black Muslims & Hebrew Israelites

in a gold Pharaoh nemes headdress & glitter cape.

today he shed his slave name & Herman Blount

became Sun Ra, a vessel taking trips to Saturn

way before any white man made it to the moon.

hugh hefner, a Play Boy

December 1953

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

Gloria Steinem

his first wife Mildred cheated. her guilt

assuaged. she allowed him to play, boy.

they split. he boasted of the twelve cover girls

in a subscription cycle, he’d bed eleven. never pay, boy.

captain of industry & sexual harassment, selling

the dream. a new hi-fi. just press play, boy.

the parties, a wink, a club house, cosby friend

offering quaaludes, thigh openers. he preyed, boy.

flaccid maleness. plastic surgery, eurocentric

ageless, airbrushed. his fantasy, a play. boy

with a mansion. potato chips & porn. knockoff

chic, convinced he’s a bon vivant, a playboy.

skin stretched, ascot knot over his gizzard. silk pajama sleaze.

when he realize G-d’s feminine, he’ll wish he woulda prayed, boy.

the walt disney of misogyny, mainstreaming objectification. bunnies

splayed bare, just supposed to lay there, silent, in playboy.

Mamie Till Bears the Movement

Roberts Temple Church of G-d, 4021 S. State St.

September 3, 1955

I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.

Mamie Till-Mobley

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

Mamie told ’em keep the casket open.

king daley Unfurls His burnham Plan

1958–1965

daley’s plan took

105 acres in one fell swoop.

closed the entry point to immigrants

from everywhere. one of the only

integrated neighborhoods,

old Maxwell Street.

the wives of city workers organized

protests. jammed their aged, round

bodies into his fifth floor city hall office

to throw books & foreign expletives

at the mayor who sighed & turned

a dumb, dead ear & corned-beef heart.

UIC is built in the architectural style of brutalism.

what was said to be a bridge to the community

was a concrete casket. a cement balloon

expanding on inflated budgets & the mayor’s hot air

a big bad wolf blowing houses down. eight thousand

people displaced. six hundred businesses.

the campus a typhoon on the near west side.

university hall a grave marker, a castle

in the heavens. the administration looks down

like the peregrine falcons who made refuge

on the 28th floor: birds of a feather, predators of the sky.

The Division Street Riots

June 12, 1966

the summer of the first

Puerto Rican Day parade, the hood

bomba-d in the face of imperialists.

cops felt some type of way. chased

Aracelis Cruz thru alleys & shot him

in the back. neighbors stepped

off porches, from in front of coolers

to assist the young man laying

on the ground in the lot near Damen

& the police protected the land

grab with batons & brute force & beat

abuelitas armed with only chancletas.

for 2 days, Division became the Island

unified. the sun rose & soon the metal

flags. the iron of Oscar Lopez. Humboldt

Park to La Clark, Puerto Ricans aligned

across redlines with Panthers, a coalition

of Brown & Black, the bosses’ greatest fear.

Division Street became a gauntlet

a proving ground. Cha Cha Jimenez[6]

would feel the earth quiver & kneel

before its majesty, in isolation, in county

throwing up junk & sins & the Young

Lords will rise like the sun

& daughters & sons will defend

abuelitas armed with chancletas

in the name of the island & ancient

G-ds, in solidarity & self-determination.

the fight, the stand

the stake in the land

from here, a people

will not move.

Martin Luther King Prays in Marquette Park

August 5, 1966

That is no Jerusalem on Lake Michigan.

MLK

he journeyed to the hot

cauldron of the South Side

to pry apartments open. make them

livable, not slumlord roach traps.

his people here told him not to.

Jesse & nem warned these white clans

weren’t a dumb collection of farm hands.

the whole city’s a white gang.

but King couldn’t listen with all the blood in his ear.

in the month the poor & old

wilt cuz the city whites & boils

bricks, sticks & epithets flew.

one rocked King in the crown.

brought him to his knees. made

his blood faucet & mix with dirt

white men stole & misspelled.

what curse did he utter

beneath his breath, onto the land

we reek of & revel in.

what prayer did he plant.

what whisper raised

a forest, a Chairman Fred.

what mark of Cain did he cut

into the park named for french colonists

into the city of no peace. his blood

a potion that parted a sea to lead whites

to the land promised in schaumburg

a sham burg, a death. a dead; see

america in parts. a King bent

beneath the furnace mouth

of a white mass, an american

church, a dragon he couldn’t slay.

Studs Terkel Drops a Mixtape

January 16, 1967[7]

it started in the lobby of his parents’

boarding house; a thousand colloquialisms

& idiosyncratic speech patterns. it started

with a kid in a cab, the discipline

of empathy. the tape recorder

a time machine. a teleporter. mirror

& mountaintop. it started talking

to 200 everyday people. no celebrity.

edited 70. ages 15 to 90: bar owners & alcoholics,

a Native American boiler man, activists,

racists, teachers & the forgotten who live

alone in furnished rooms. populism

on the page. guerilla journalism

before it was called that. it started

in Bug House Square: the denizen forum

for radicals & miscreants, the genius & insane

lines blurred, irrelevant. here is the collected

memory of a city that is the country

the microcosm. the division in us all.

Carl Sandburg Village (Where My Parents Met)

1967–1969

When we did Sandburg, the other streets around it were full of flophouses. So Sandburg Village was like a military operation. We had to have the sufficient size and numbers to go in there and push the enemy back. Coldly. Like D-Day.

john cordwell, chief architect of Carl Sandburg Village

the apartments were new & beautiful & appeared out of nowhere. my moms parents worried she moved so close to Cabrini, so close, to so many Black people. she left junior college, got a job selling downtown at a department store. she moved in with her friend Helain. flocks of young white people came to the new Sandburg Village, built as a buffer between the wealthy center, a growing Puerto Rican neighborhood to the north & high-rise projects housing Black lives like a prison to the east. the management so paranoid & adamant in their protection of the downtown hold, they put the national guard on top of the roof during the rebellion after Martin King was murdered. the onslaught they feared, never came.

there was a pool on the roof, an alluring feature. my father gigged there as a lifeguard. it was his third. one at a bar, one at a school. he lived close with his buddy Gary, in a coach house at 1338 North LaSalle. he moved from Edgewater south to be near the gigs & a growing scene of college grads beginning to nightlife on Division Street. what were these young whites called then: intruders, pioneers, pawns. in struts my mother, one afternoon, my father on duty. he asked to see her key, her membership for admission. she was not having it that day or any in her life & promptly gave him the finger, the middle, with the quickness. she complained in tones unnecessary for a saturday at 2. my father listened, nodded, waited til she finished, then, unmoved, still asked to see her key. she chucked them at the table. the keys hopped into his hand like a shortstop. my pops was impressed, surprised by the flex. she walked away before he could say anything. he saw her pass, in all her glory, and his weak, lone response was: damn.

after cooling off in the chlorine she apologized by flirting. invited him & Gary for dinner that night. they cooked & ate & talked about people they might have in common, the convention, the riots, all the change the city/country was mired in. my father worked at a bar called the Store, not far on Clark Street. Helain & my moms went. he poured drinks. she watusied. they caught each other’s eye & moms mouthed the words i love you. she was wild like that, reckless cause she had nothing. my father looked behind, around, shocked, put a finger to his chest, mouthed a question back: me. she nodded & kept dancing.

she stayed on a stool, an elbow, & waited for him. they went back to her place, in the Sandburg Village & they each swear all they did was talk night, into the new day, witnessing the morning in her new apartment, getting to know one another in the new city/country, changing by fist & fire.

Wall of Respect

August 27, 1967

white people can’t stand / the wall...Black beauty hurts them—

Haki Madhubuti, The Wall

picasso ain’t got shit on us[8]

so said the nine who portrait-ed:

Malcolm & Muhammad,

Nina & Bird, Marcus & Amiri

at 43rd & Langley.

a few weeks after

the bird/woman sculpture

revealed politicians don’t know

much bout anything, ‘specially art.

on the side of a tavern

next to Johnny’s tv & radio repair

a store that fixes the image, the wall

a shrine to Black creativity.

a 24-hour gallery where little girls

could see women who looked

like their mother. the people

came, a Black stampede.[9] a gathering

spot, an outdoor museum, no entrance

fee, free. a Black festival of chromatics

body & hue.       from here

street art & public mural

movements. walls & spray cans

will sprout, a people’s art.

the city, a canvas.

AfriCOBRA

1968

African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists.

bad the way Run-DMC defines it. a crew

trying to transcend the i for WE, Muhammad Ali.

relevant like how most art ain’t cuz institutions

beholden to the loaned collections of the rich

& they don’t want a painting holding a knife

to their neck.

Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Gerald Williams,

& Barbara Jones-Hogu made Kool-Aid colors for superReal

people. colors the people would be drawn to: the luster

of a just-washed head, the glint of sunglasses, grandparents’

shea-butter sheen, Afro puffs & a girl in a yellow overcoat.

after them: Kerry James Marshall, SLANG

Krista Franklin, Hebru Brantley, Amanda Williams,

art that hasn’t been made, prints created

so an 8-year-old in Woodlawn or L-Town

may wake every morning & see themselves.

The Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton

December 4, 1969

the Panthers came home to the West Side

near Chicago Stadium where the bulls play

& no memorial sits. a statue for mike

but nothing for Mark Clark & Chairman Fred.

what shook hoover: Black children eating

breakfast, starting the day with sustenance

& the free conversation between the real rainbow

coalition: Young Lords & Young Patriots,

the non-aggression pact the Panthers negotiated

an alliance of street organizations that loved

the second amendment a lot & Black people

the most.

secobarbital, a sedative, was slipped in his drink

by an informant. Fred to sleep forever in the blood bed

next to Akua, 8 months blooming. at 4:45am cpd & fbi

bust thru the door, knew exactly where the Chairman

was cuz the blueprint, cointelpro. 2 shots point blank

into the mind of a genius. Fred of Maywood, 21 years

old, executed by the state for being with the proletariat

against the pigs. the last words on his lips:

i am a revolutionary

Don L. Lee Becomes Haki Madhubuti

1972

lee was not a revolutionary name:

an ill fit after the army he served

& left, after his mother’s decline & death,

after reading Richard Wright & seeing his

body in Black for the first time.

Haki was given by a committee of ancestors.

a reclamation & renaming. they allowed him

to reintroduce himself: Haki means justice.

Madhubuti is four syllables, means precise.

means dependable. what other poet/writer

teacher been more dependable in the struggle

for justice.

Haki Madhubuti means long haul & fire, means

the work for real, means storefronts will blossom

to Black institutions, means build with Black stones

means anybody down to build, means by any, reinvention

of the world, the word to burn. lee an effigy to the white

wor(l)d left behind                     smoldering & ashy.

Haki Madhubuti means the Black future ahead.

The Chicago 21 Plan

September 1973

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the Loop. . . . It is one word: B-L-A-C-K.

arthur rubloff, real estate developer, in the Chicago Daily News

oak and chandelier. opaque light

filtering thru the day’s death. an ash

tray near each fat white hand.

the original canopy of cigar smoke.

what is meant by back room dealing.

a plan to centralize in the loop.

to build a mote, a fortress. a gold

coast. gold mine. mine. take dead

tracks & build condos. river norths.

south loops to stave off white flight.

to usher white folk into condos.

into printers row. choke Cabrini

of its green.

pay to play. pay to stay. everyone was in

on the act. the universities & big businesses.

hold the center. transform blues to white

collar. daley to daley. Black to white. flight

from the past. erasure by another name:

gentrification’s birth certificate.

Leaving Aldine

1978

my pops wanted to make his own

name. build a restaurant with his on it.

my brother was not yet. i was & remember

the movers. the men who worked & drove

a truck as i would. there was not a lot left

in the apartment. soon there would not be

my pops in the house.

but before

at the window, i was

playing with the blinds. spider

man on the television not yet

repossessed. the bead chain

my web. my earliest memory

the apartment, the city. a hope

something would make me     stick

Ode to Steppin

1978

when you could only buy 78s

& the jitterbug slowed to smooth.

when the lindy hop landed

in a little bit of bread & the hawk

adorned the body in long coats

& fox furs. when gents were majestic

& ladies mirrored the men, one foot

at a time, but did it backwards

meaning they went harder

but you couldn’t tell cuz the glide

& off time cool was no sweat at all.

when Jeffree Perry should’ve been

a star & Black Mary was Chicago’s Queen,

stepper sets filled Bronzeville ballrooms

& basements & weekend banquet halls.

when people’s parents still married

or at least together cuz of the kids.

when you could raise a family in the city

E&J away a weekend with a woman

in one hand & a handkerchief in the other.

when you were a gouster or ivy league.

when high or low end wasn’t a death sentence.

when the middle class was an aspiration

the city/country seemed to believe

& folks could take some time to get there

at least til Monday or at least til Sunday

morning when the lights would come on

like the sun at the lake no one could afford

to live near. when the weekend was over

but love’s gonna last like the stubborn couple

at the end of the night, when the DJ’s gone

quiet & the chairs overturn on tables

& the turntables tumbleweed

but the 4/4 still ghost-steps

in their bodies at the end of the dance

floor, quiet as they float above

portable wood tiles or taut linoleum

as one. when one night is all

anyone ever needs.

Disco Demolition

July 12, 1979

White males . . . see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.

Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone

steve dahl donned a helmet

a military uniform, drove the diamond

in an army jeep. dahl was a white

middle brow disc jock. his listeners

white men in the middle of america.

factories were packing up. the world

promised began to look other/wise.

dahl & white sox management

made a promo night to attract

a dwindling fan base

in a subpar season.

it was 98 cents to get in

if fans brought a record

to be blown up in center field.

Disco was dance

for the generation after Vietnam.

sped up Soul dreamt in Gay

clubs, Black & Latino & more.

& the whites came

& the whites came.

tonight they came, aroused

with beer & records to burn.

a vinyl bonfire. Black records

aflame.

comiskey park

in bridgeport, home of the dick

daleys. they fell in love with their mother’s

corned beef & cabbage & an architectural

appreciation for viaducts.

white men hopped turnstiles, ticket lines.

more bodies crammed in comiskey

than there’d ever been. Chicago was playing

Detroit. cities dwindling like the white majority.

dahl set the fire. a ringmaster,

a comic imp, a cowardly warlord.

a small pop & boom! fans

stormed the field, littered

the grass with bottles & concession debris.

records sliced the air like weapons.

long hairs in lee jeans & cut-off

t-shirts slid into second. they stole home

again. a crater burned into center

field. a white mob on the diamond.

the game postponed, forfeit, rigged

from the beginning. Harry Caray couldn’t

control the crowd or get them back

in their seats. the police were called:

uncles & fathers came to chase

their sons. the force restrained.

no one was shot or beat to death.

there were scoldings, few arrests.

steve dahl walked free.

Chicago

would grind disco in a steel mill

run it thru electric sockets til it bumped

grimy. til it was House & jacked

the body. til the technology

displaced white disc jocks.

made them obsolete, old machines

dancing in their graves.

mayor byrne Moves Into & Out of Cabrini Green

Easter Sunday, April 19, 1981

the first night

the mayor & her husband

watched the academy awards,

april fools in a two-bedroom

apartment furnished

by montgomery ward

in the most infamous

project on the planet

protected by 2 bodyguards

6 squad cars. her publicist

said she’d return to her gold

coast apartment a few blocks

east for a change

of clothes or perhaps a week

end, tho residents saw her sneak

in every morning & out each night

for three weeks           she lasted.

& such is whiteness

the ability to de-robe

a life/style & return to privilege

awash in skin, adorned in birth

rite. a retreat, a return

back across heavily patrolled

borders of wealth

& white / working & not          white.

on easter the mayor’s blonde

ambition presides over an egg

hunt, the residents picket,

chant: we need jobs, not eggs

jane byrne is the ku klux klan

the mayor as invader

conquistador, missionary:

idyllic words backed by force.

on the day Jesus returns

the mayor flees.

Ron Hardy Plays the Record Backwards

The Music Box. 1982–1987

I can imagine him praying before he put on his turntables.

Adonis, Chicago acid house pioneer

Robert Williams gave him the run of the place.

a playground of speakers. an open studio to mad

scientist. shirt open, he’d dr. frankenstein sound.

stitch Black soul to new wave. one afternoon

high as shit, he must’ve flipped. turned the needle

upside down, spun the tone arm over, propped the wax

on a cylinder to keep it spinning, pushed the platter

to earth & played it backwards. on beat. his mind

forever changed. on heroin, the music slowed to a nod.

he sped it up. dancers jacked new velocities. sent

a generation to their parents’ record collections

to rescue history. to dig & cut it up. resuscitate it

for the people to feel in a way that could move them

to (a)movement. break & pose & vogue before madonna

stole. before it was called that. from Chatham, a whole

city seeking sanctuary on his dance floor to get loose

& live & high, to find themselves aligned.

a fix, of chaos, in order to get free.

The Assassination of Rudy Lozano

June 8, 1983

a man driven by a search for unity among people

Harold Washington on Rudy Lozano

he was kicked out of high school

looking for Latino history. his curiosity

built Juarez, rivers at Cermak & Ashland.

Pilsen, his home. Harold, his homie

he helped elect thru organizing

the neighborhood & Del Rey tortilla

workers. mustache like a push broom.

a texas Chicano, Chicago son

whose sister & sons fight sin

fronteras. the city

so shook, it armed itself.

sent a 17-year-old

into the summer night

into the Lozano kitchen

with a hammer trembling

before the scariest architectural

idea: a bridge built between

Black & Brown workers, a class

alliance, a border crossing.

Marc Smith Invents the Poetry Slam

1984

the city’s a racket

so loud you can’t hear yourself shit.

space for quiet some yuppie luxury.

Marc built homes with his hands.

moved metal, lunch pail, hot thermos

to a saloon. in the evening stories came.

the apple fell on his head

after work at 1758 North Honore

the Get Me High Lounge:

red lamps, music ledgers

lining the john, smoke

& flannel everywhere:

america loves sport

but needs story.

he handed scorecards to the regulars.

Tony Fitzpatrick, the referee.

Patricia Smith, the city’s empress.

Marc stood on top of a table

in his father’s coat & pulled a poem

from night. part Sandburg

part Saul Alinsky, for a few seconds

the din sunk to the floor. even the drunks

listened, remembered their own

mother, their bum day, an outrage.

the poem no longer untouched

in a museum. it paraded the streets

on the shoulders of giants & pigeons.

it sat in a church hat on the bus

& wound its way into the throats

of every man, woman & non-binary

being.

as he spoke the last word,

a locomotive rumbling

into the station, gasping

screeching, letting the steam

out, he extended his hand

& ear to hear all the words:

& he pulled the next one up

& the next one

& the next

Collateral Damage

1985

coke was cheap & stacked

on tables, hidden in cute purses

in glass vials. around at lunch time

at the merchandise mart

where moms moved lines

for big stores carrying the latest fashion.

i don’t think she’s

who the CIA envisioned as clientele.

she’s young & single & struggling

to make rent. she’d hit Faces,

the disco on rush street & come home high

& not make rent. & we’d move again.

the suburbs our diaspora:

the divorce took us from Sanders Road.

there was the ranch house on Walters.

the townhome in Pheasant Creek.

the one near mama.

the one behind the Phillips ’76.

the one behind white hen.

i’m forgetting a few.

white had a hold of my family

too. my home, a chess piece,

a chair holding a parking spot

in the snow, a vacated split

level. an eviction, notice: white

working. we lived in cooked

county.

The Day Harold Died

November 27, 1987

we went to the rock & roll mcdonald’s the wednesday before thanksgiving. moms took a half-day. she was fly & a fashion rep—high on a mound of white. i was 12 & lived with Harold for four years. he was somewhere between Malcolm X & Martin King & a Black grandfather whose feet i wanted to sit at. he was barack before barack; a Chicago hope, a Chicago King who brought Latins & Blacks together like Frankie Knuckles. the first Black mayor in the city of DuSable.

the rock & roll mcdonald’s was filled with sequined capes, shiny 50s bar stools, elvis/beatles posters in half a hall of fame of white-washed memorabilia. not a Buddy Guy pic in sight, not a Howling Wolf guitar lick on the jukebox. in the city of Muddy Waters the golden arches were a white heaven where jump blues turned vanilla shake.

i knew i didn’t like white music & was beginning to know the extent white people lied on history & in the parking lot that day i knew a lunch out with moms & my brother was a luxury. i knew this was how rich people must live, ordering, off menus. i knew at any time things could be taken away; electricity, fathers, mothers in handcuffs.

we ate in the car. moms juggling a fleeting to-do list in her brain. my brother, a boy monk in the front seat trying to visualize some future stability. his heart still, a soft fruit, sweet. he carried toys in his pocket, wanted a transformer for Hanukkah, hoped that what we were, was not the limit of what we could become.

the car was on cuz the hawk[10] was swooping between buildings on Ontario & Ohio like a flood & the radio was audible & murmuring, tuned to WBBM or WGN or maybe even GCI if moms let us have a say that day, for once in our life. we were mid-bite in the damp & growing cold of november & the radio whispered, Harold was dead. it was the afternoon & i didn’t think someone could leave with the sun still out, a giant shining overhead like some Moses, some Tubman, promising a possible land. the radio said he sipped his coffee, slumped at his table, his heart attacked & he was gone.

i thought we’d have to move next, like when the landlord says go.

The Mayor was gone & soon too, the people.

Patronage

February 29, 1992

If I can’t help my sons then they can kiss my ass! I make no apologies to anyone. There are many men in this room whose fathers helped them and they went on to become fine public servants. If a man can’t put his arms around his sons and help them, then what’s the world coming to?

richard m. daley, January 2, 1977

a city of stupid sons. boys being

boys. stealing their father’s new white

chevy blazer & driving an hour & a half

around the U of the lake to their summer home

in michigan to get turnt & let off catholic boy

steam & drink, pull out a shotgun, a baseball bat

& beat an indiana boy’s brain to blood clot.

no daley will serve

time. time is for other sons

without birthright. without a firm

that will receive millions in sewage

contracts, shit money filling up

bank accounts or the internet

contract for o’hare or the tur global

investment firm where daley & his boy

sell off Chicago’s public goods

to the highest bidder. bitter

men & their dumb sons.

daley’s daddy made his son

the state’s attorney despite failing

the bar twice & never trying

a case. when evidence of police torture

graced his desk in the early ’80s

it was ignored. his ignorance made him

mayor.

& what

father wouldn’t

want to stand for his son.

make a call or tell a judge

over lunch at the Chicago club

to take it easy, let the family

handle it.

patronage

is a Chicago word for family

for taking care of one’s own

& what father would disagree

or wouldn’t want to spare his son

from jail or death, a desire for a life

easier than his own.

Fresh to Death

Summer 1992

In Chicago, police created a whole new crime category, Starter Jacket Murders

Jet Magazine, May 11, 1992

starter jackets were the coldest

second skin. they’d glitter

in the wholesale windows

of Maxwell Street storefronts

like flags or primary-colored

emeralds. shone from Black

poets on Yo! MTV Raps.

Chicago, Hornets, mascots, cities

emblazoned on the chest

like tribal tats, religions, gang

affiliations. clean sport cuffs

& collar. snap buttons & sheen.

the coolest wore them open even

in the crisp air, airing rope gold

& white tees. a coat perfect

for the fall. so much loot, you’d

get slapped just for thinkin

bout askin your mama for one.

oil-slick arms just outta reach

like everything in america.

so cold it seemed reasonable

this could be the ocean of satin

somebody might die over.

Molemen Beat Tapes

1993

were copped from Gramaphone.

cassettes jammed into the factory

issued stereo deck of the hoopty

i rolled around in. a bucket. bass

& drum looped with some string

sample, fixed. a sliver of perfect

adjusted. the scrapes of something

reconstituted. there was so much

space to fill. an invitation to utter.

Iqra- Allah said to the prophet

Muhammad (peace be upon Him).

a to b-side & around again. a circle

a cipher. i’d drive down & back

in my moms dodge for the latest

volumes of sound. i’d stutter

& stop & begin again. lonesome

& on fire. none. no one i knew

rapped. i’d recite alone on Clark Street

free, styling, shaping, my voice

a sapling, hatchling, rapping

my life, emerging in the dark

of an empty car.



there was a time when hip-hop felt like a secret

society of wizards & wordsmiths. magicians

meant to find you or you were meant to find

like rappers i listened to & memorized in history

class talked specifically to me, for me.



& sometimes

you’d see a kid whisper to himself

in the corner of a bus seat & you

asked if he rhymed & traded a poem

a verse like a fur pelt / trapping.

some gold or food. this sustenance.

you didn’t have to ride solo anymore.



Jonathan was the first kid i met who rapped. he was Black

from a prep school, wore ski goggles on top his head & listened

to Wu-Tang which meant he was always rhyming about science

& chess. his pops made him read Sun Tzu. his mans was Omega

a fat Puerto Rican who wrote graffiti & smoked bidis.

& they’d have friends

& the back seat would swell

& the word got passed / scooped like a ball

on the playground. you’d juggle however long

your mind could double-dutch. sometimes you’d take

what you were given / lift off like a trampoline

rocket launch. sometimes you’d trip & scrape

your knees. tongue-tied, not quick. words stuck

on loop, like like words, stuck, like that. but break

thru, mind, knife sharp, mind darts

polished & gleaming we’d ride

for the sake of rhyming. take the long way

home or wherever the fuck we were going

cruise down Lake Shore & back, blasting

blazing. polishing these gems.

trying to get our mind right.

Graffiti Blasters: An Erasure (A Buff)

1993[11]

Graffiti         scars         hurt

Chicago

blast                          trucks

use baking soda        high

pressure          remove

stone                         mineral.

a model

for other cities foreign

WarsawPragueMilanChina                            Arizona

the City’s anti-crime        program

depends

on removal          we make every effort

to remove.

The Department works very closely          with Police      will apprehend vandals

deface.

No Chicago             has to tolerate                                    graffiti.

Please join us          in eliminating               a beautiful city

The Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act

September 13, 1994

made the streets gaunt

ghost like. gave daley

the impetus to cut heads

of gangs with abandon

& no oversight. 100,000

new police. 9.7 billion for

mass incarceration. inmate

education no more

Malcolms or Etheridges.

jail rigid, more separatist.

more private stock

options on how to pile

minors. magicians

making students

vanish, school to prison

pipeline, urban out

fitted, since this bill

clinton passed & rahm

rammed thru congress

making democrats

republican. when the country

tricked the huddled masses

the poor & tired deported

kids kidnapped off the block.

there’s a 33 percent chance

each Black man will be

in chains again. 3 strikes

means life. means gone

til november like the jobs.

means the 13th amendment

applies here, means you can’t

apply here. jobs obsolete.

delete. means you’ll be

deleted. defeated. the city

creates an indentured

servitude, a new service

sector. a new slavery.

The Etymology of Chicago Joe

September 27, 1994

Slim was fresh, Joe

Common, “I used to love H.E.R”

in Chicago, we call men Joe

from the hebrew, Yosef

Jacob’s eleventh son. Jesus’s stepdad.

as in Louis, Frazier, DiMaggio.

as in cup of. Joe Blow

an average fellow. a generic man.

G.I. with the kung-fu grip

though most Joes have trouble

holding a grip. the every man

Algren wrote of, Joe Felso

the hustler & hustled.

shoeless & misunderstood

despite hall of fame numbers.

Joe is always looking for work.

Joe is always looking over his shoulder.

Joe gets nervous when someone walks up on him too quick.

Joe gets nervous when cops around.

Joe is illegal.

Joe is an immigrant.

Joe is a regular guy trying to make it

& for that you can get knocked

on the head or worse

in this city. the grind keeps

Joe’s nose to the stone

streets paved in potholes.

Joe should have his number retired.

Joe is a retired numbers runner.

too many Joes have county-issued numbers.

too many Joes numb & unaccounted for.

Joe, a sure thing you can count on

Joe is tired of running.

Common’s Resurrection

October 25, 1994

beloved, know how amped we was:

the first time the culture rooted

in Chicago stories & slang. locales

our own, on the bus to touch home. here

the names of streets we knew, ran. a young

man we’d seen off Cottage, at the jam, heard

on WHPK. he sounded like the city

we loved that will never love us back.

sounded cold, like he had one. on wax

for the whole country to hear. an international

megaphone a dozen years after The Message

loud & clear: the children of Gwendolyn Brooks

are rappers. his pops played ABA ball.

moms, a doctor of education. a Chicago son

speaking what he/we knew: Andre Hatchett,

carfare, jewtown. Stony Isle, DJ Pharris, Leon’s

BBQ. high schools we went to, fought with

played against, girls we hollered at. the greatest

extended metaphor hip-hop ever wrote.

monuments for what was/is here. when

mad was tall & phat was cold. we loved

Twista who rapped so quick we needed

a translator. DA Smart, Fast Eddie

the super bowl shuffle, a slew of graffiti

writers who went to war with mayor daley

but Common put Chicago at the intersection

of the culture, made Ice Cube an actor. mike

on vinyl, a ring you could hear in the sweetgums

& sycamores. footprints in the sand at lake

shore, a blueprint for the many to come.

The Supreme Court Makes Color Illegal

March 3, 1995

Residents of Chicago will be the losers, for they forfeit the benefits of spray paint.

Justice John Paul Stevens

nothing vivid, nothing out

the ordinary, nothing off

grey       scale. out                                   the lines

of black & white.                                                  (whites only)

nothing

cops can’t read

think is a gang

every kid

of color with color

a gang. gang, what

is a crew

a community, policed.

even the art, the innovation

gone. brush, color gone.

a country

of bone & art school.

everything here illegal:

art, people of color         with color

nothing with color

nothing that questions

that jars the mind

aware awake.   a wake

only. no spray

paint. bullets ok.

grave markers ok.

targets ok

the store, on backs

of bodies of color with color ok.

ok          color, the problem.

color the criminal.

criminalize color, ok. ok.

Erasing the Green

September 27, 1995[12]

tearin down the ’jects creatin plush homes

Common, “Resurrection”

towers torn before 9-11.                                     & no good times filmed here.

gaping wounds. living                                        fear of a nation & feeding

rooms gut bare. painted                                     frenzies on the carcass. the bare

walls for the city to see                                      skeletal dreams of public

brick tumble into graves, rubble                 housing returning to earth.

like barney. the stone age.                        dust.  ghost.   memory. maybe

headstones for Keisha                                   raise three-bedroom townhomes.

& Dantrell Davis. Girl X                                  the old grocery store where milk

marks the spot Candyman                       & lottery tickets sold/bought

minstreled celluloid screams                             sandwiched        between

in the throats of white america.                young professionals   like wonderbread.

an abacus of broken promises.                  cost an arm & leg       leg arm head.

an aberration too close to gold                 no g-d here, unless the church worship

coasts. wires wild like snakes. snakes                              the dollar.

like banks with redevelopment monies.                the irony.

HOPE grants. good times filmed here.     the green.

Ida B. Wells Testifies in the Ghost Town

1995–2011[13] in the rubble of the Ida B. Wells Homes

this is not the white city,

though perhaps it is a city

for whites. these are the Southern

Horrors: abandoned streets, boarded

buildings, empty tumbleweed lots.

you can hear Lake Michigan

in a coke can. this barren land

where children once moved

from these blocks to prison

auctioned.

blocks never been safe.

this a Red Record of displacement.

what happens when culture amnesias.

I sat on a train seventy years before

Montgomery. what’ll this land be named:

scrapped plan for poor & Black, will it

be Lynchburg or Prisonton, New Laborville

the white city, again. these homes

had my name on them. now

I stand on rhodes near bridgeport,

astonished. prime land, my body, real

estate for the taking. dismembered

by hands the shade of ghost. my body

disfigured, again, this is what happens

when culture amnesias, when cities cancel

its promise, call it renewal. what happens

to those blue light monitored & standardized

test tracked, those forced into obsolete industrial

training, railroaded into new slave labor, orange

suited & disenfranchised, what do we do

with the forgotten, those left            out

to

hang

like ghosts.

I witness until the world does

until ghost stories are documented

& irrefutable, until America is haunted

by the spirits of those it says never happened.

How to Teach Poetry in Chicago Public Schools

back to school, 1996

look clean. fresh

kicks, cut, jeans. iron

them shits. cuz even in uniform

the baddest student swagger on a 100

& those the kids you hope to build

with. the ones who got a crate

of albums on heart:

Weezy, Gucci, Waka Flocka

some may even have they own

bars for days. spit

alone in their room,

to their girl, a little

brother. they might

be reluctant to share

especially with a teacher

especially with a whiteboy.

start with a rhyme, something

quick. a half note behind

Westside double time.

their ears piqued, able

to roll with all those syllables.

now read a poem. something

slow, familial, familiar

an offering to Gwendolyn Brooks

& Carl Sandburg sitting on your shoulder.

ask where their favorite rapper is from:

J from Marcy

Ye, the South Side

everybody know Wayne

katrina’s soldier boy.

from ’97 to ’03

have a firm, well-reasoned opinion

on who is better: Pac or Big.

after that Young Money, new language

Kanye couplets on memory.

photocopy Willie Perdomo’s Where I’m From

the wrong way. do this to mess with them

to throw a monkey wrench into normal.

none of us are from Spanish Harlem.

but Englewood know bout police.

every block in the hundreds

got old men who talk shit

guns that fire cracker

grandmothers who stir

big pots. the whole West Side is

littered with nieces telling you

to look past bluebox street lights

cuz regardless of where you from

you from there, you know there

& have never been asked

to expert.

so speak on it.

talk about it.

all you gotta do

is sit that ass down

& write.

Lenard Clark Pedals for Air

March 21, 1997

on the first day of spring

weather might warm

long enough for kids to come outside

again, a miracle in a city where winter

can linger til may.

basketballs & bicycles in need of air

after sitting six months without

bounce & pedal.

in Bronzeville, home of the Black

renaissance, the South Side Community

Art Center, where Ms. Brooks & Margaret Burroughs

meet for tea, Black people have to pay 25 cents for air.

in Bridgeport, home of irish, polish & italian immigrants,

Chicago’s mafia & the mayors daley, white folks

get all the air they wish for nothin.

from the windows of the Stateway Gardens

looking west across 12 lanes of the dan ryan express way

where eminent domain is another name for land grab

& colonization, Bridgeport is visible from Bronzeville.

& Lenard Clark didn’t want to pay for what should be free

so he pedaled over the expressway & under the bridge & viaduct

into a neighborhood where white boys have been bragging

about keeping Blacks out since 1919.

& Frank Caruso Jr., the son of a guy

in the Chicago mob & two of his classmates

at De La Salle—the all-boys catholic school

of irish mayors & the italian outfit

(& if you think this is the first & last

time the two worked together i got

ocean front property in Cicero

i’d like to sell ya)—these older boys

saw Lenard peddling across borders

& chased the 13-year-old into an alley

& kicked his head into a coma.

this is how Black boys are bar-mitzvahed

in Chicago/america, by boot & brick, his boy

hood/body left deflated              in the alley

so far away                                  from home.

Baby Come On: An Ode to Footwork

1997

this is tap gone gangster.

in Wolof the Senegalese say dzugu:

to live wickedly. Juke is wicked music

unsanctioned house. a hundred & sixty beats

per minute.

here

folk move. turn the foot

Road Runner & Michael Jackson.

uprock on amphetamine. dance

in the war zone. in the war on drugs

Jack your body became run for your life

in place. on house arrest. take this space

small & make the most of it. glide

then magic, majestic, jack-knife leg

polyrhythm. pirouette stomp.

marionette legs on hot coals

on hot blocks. running man

in a circle or line / up. opposite

of prison. a battle no one gets hurt

most of the time. tip-toe kung-fu                         kick

then drag the foot in molasses.

it’s all that. all those hidden                    Black

magic diasporic movements that might               kill whitefolk:

The Jig & Cakewalk                    Pigeon Wing & Ring Dance

& Capoeira in praise of Shango or DJ Rashad or

R.P. Boo          or some other deity

that don’t look like a private dick or dick daley.

the foot is furious. the foot is working /      the foot is kicking         that ass

Black on Black time & space travel       sound             barrier           / broke

not confined to the speed        /      of the body.

over    lo-fi low-budget bass            K-town favela funk             /. fuck

frenzy. fake out.      ghetto house. James Brown            jumping       bullets.

a ballet of the hustle. no money            no problem.

in the south they spoke Gullah             /                                            a creole

called it joog,       juke:              something disorderly    / not    normal.

the foot                /      body not supposed to move         /          like that

not that rubber            band       /      not that                 unshackled

to gravity

/    not that          free

A Moratorium on the Death Penalty

January 31, 2000

today is a victory         for the hundreds

who persevered

who pushed the impossible

who fundraised in cafeterias

in church community rooms

with paper plates & mac & cheese

made by mothers of sons facing state execution

who believe in Jesus’s proclivity to save.

it took a few journalists

who trust in long hours & interviews

whose reports bloomed above the muck

& tabloid like lotus.

law professors at Northwestern

who had an inclination & a class

of committed students

who sifted thru thousands of documents

who uncovered truths the city hid

who shed new light. A People’s Law Office

who filed & pro-bono-ed & argued on behalf of men

who Chicago tortured into confession before guantánamo

a dark room, a simulated death & electric shocks

on the watch & under the eye of states attorney richard m. daley

who never investigated or testified to what he knew

who rahm saved before subpoena.

today is a victory         for the activists

who spend their lives ensuring the lives of others

will not be taken by a racist state of injustice,

who are prison abolitionists & radical nuns

who are cultural organizers & writers & socialists

who are sisters & mothers & grandmothers

of the incarcerated

today is a monument to the moment

the Death Row 10

found each other inside

a rotting system, men

who traded notes & formed a community

a minyan, a cipher, a crew of support

who fought & wrote prayers in a bottle

who used the prison library

who read & decoded the legalese

who reached out & organized the outside

from within

who made collage flyers to pass thru prison bars

who communicated & galvanized a movement

10 to stir the masses

who will become thousands

who stand in for millions

this city/country has murdered

& stolen from their homes in the night

thru decades of police torture & forced confessions

the justice system blind to its own          white

supremacy.

10 men

who in the bowels of county & state max security

would tell what happened

whose words will rise thru letter

& recording & shake the governor’s mansion

who today declared a moratorium on death

(maybe to save his own ass & reputation)

but

today is a monument

that will lead to a ban

to exonerations

to reparations

a path for the city/

country to follow

Praise the House Party

May 17, 2000[14]

after Krista Franklin & Britteney Kapri

praise parents asleep in front of a television after a double or grinding the night of a third shift. praise the train i learned to ride: the red to the blue to a bus in the hopes the address was written down right on the quarter-sheet someone photocopied well before there ever was a kinko’s. praise the desire to sneak out & listen to teenage DJs mash bits of records together that didn’t make sense to the ear, new arrangements that propelled us out the house like an odd sonic bat signal so we could grind & jack the body & its parts. praise the body & its parts. praise the sweat & funk the body makes. praise the basement so hot it made the outfit you spent an hour preparing optional. praise new shoelaces & an old toothbrush to resurrect your busted kicks. praise jean shorts, the shortest ones. praise the wop & roger rabbit. praise radio shack & the mess of wires jammed into odd-fitting speakers. praise the vocational-high-school-know-how-to-rig bass box sub-woofers. praise Black hands manipulating black wax. praise the pans & knobs & casio keyboards put to use in ways manufacturers never imagined. praise the punch that wasn’t spiked. praise the punch that was. praise counterfeit chemists & quarter-juice shamans. praise the folk who came to get you when you needed them to. praise the lock pick, the lookout, the abandoned loft, the house of squatters. praise the friend that told a friend. praise the heat between bodies making winter bearable. praise the night that becomes day. praise the get down, the packed jam. praise your mans, an employee with keys to the storage facility. praise the factories that shipped jobs elsewhere & the jobs that did stay. praise the empty spaces we filled with some old records & new styles & ourselves. praise ourselves for passing time, for keeping time & making time stop & making time irrelevant, for forgetting time other than a curfew, when you knew your moms would wake. praise your moms waking up & for getting down, back in bed, before she did.

Día de las Madres

May 13, 2001

after they sang “Las Mañanitas” in church

after King David whispered to his beloved

Dawn. after the children gave recuerdos

to their mothers & the husbands rushed

to 26th Street to get last-minute roses, after

all the tamales & elotes & champurrados

were laid out on the nice tablecloth

eaten one last time this sweet sunup,

fourteen abuelitas y madres walked

into an open field at 31st & Kostner

in La Villita/Little Village, South

Lawndale on the West Side & started

a hunger strike on mothers day.

they sought from the city what the city

promised: a school on par with white ones

in white neighborhoods where white kids

learn. the mothers want the same, want

what’s fair, want Chicago/america

to treat their hijos with dignity & equity           too.

the field was so big you could forget you were

in the city. for nineteen days there was no food.

tents & chairs, wooded tables & song. art made

under the prairie sky. poems & music left at the feet

of the fourteen who suffered for the future,

who starved for honor long enough to win

honors classes, long enough for the school

to be named Social Justice. proof goliath’s weak

his name daley & vallas & the blueprint

for privatized corporate education could

topple from the empty stomachs

of women in solidarity.

dawn has come.

rise up, my darling

sunlight is here

the mothers have won.

Kanye Says What’s on Everybody’s Mind

September 2, 2005

yo—i’m going to ad-lib a little bit.

Kanye West to Mike Myers

live from 30rock, the Roc boy

in the building tonight. late

registration just dropped. before

waves & tidals stormed the beach

before levees broke, before

the media wd say Black folk

loot & white folk survive.

hands stuck in luxe khakis.

rugby top & gold cross

across the neck. he went off

the top

of the (astro)dome

freestyled, visibly shook

at the federal response

to Black death.

ain’t no such thing

as halfway crooks. news

bias, his own implication

lack of action, rambling

as waves crash

in the mind

trying to translate rage

into language, to latch

onto & float. he rescued

ten syllables, a concise

editor of 16s, un-teleprompted

the words typed in his heart...

& Donda had done her job.

lullabied the legacy in her son’s ear.

a Chicago State doctor channeling

her colleagues Gwendolyn Brooks

& Haki Madhubuti. their cultural son

storming live tv to tell the planet

what it can’t wash over.

I Wasn’t in Grant Park when obama Was Elected

November 4, 2008

i was on the ave, listening to the only democracy

i believe in. the longest-running youth open mic

in america. i was listening to the young

& the working, Black & unemployed

& Queer & radical imaginations dreaming

narrating the city/country they see

& fear. we were in a room of a hundred.

the street-lamps of milwaukee ave, our spot

light & faithful ear.

downtown

the pageantry projected to the planet

protected by guns & cpd. a Chicago

transplant invoked the dreams

of the founding fathers, not their captives

nor workers. the crowd screamed

droned the chant yes we can.

we were on the ave

laughing             cuz we don’t believe you,

you need more people or different ones. we were

not taken with a president-elect, a united states

senator who stood for war abroad & in the streets

those here tonight have left to be free of, for a few

& devise strategies on how to build the block back

up, for real, not waiting for a trickle down or excuses

bout how a bill becomes a law, we watched school

house rock motherfucker & stay rocking the school

in the city of house & Big Bill Haywood.

our Black presidents are killed & rounded

into prison every day.

i wasn’t in grant park when obama was elected

celebrating how great the country is. i was scheming

on the ave, with the people, cooking up a new one.

Republic Windows Workers Sit In

December 5, 2008

I would like to encourage anyone who has been in a situation like us that they fight and they demand their rights. They have nothing to lose.

Armando Robles, organizer of the Republic Windows and Doors workers

organizing began with whispers

in the break room. a tavern

after punch clock.

when the company comes to close

the workers will not leave. for six

days capitalism got its ass kicked.

the workers united will never be

defeated. they refuse to be refuse.

bossman could care less. they sit

like Buddhas, bodies on the line

in lawn chairs with coolers & hot

aluminum wrapped tamales.

the company thought they slick.

opened a non-unionized shop

in Red Oak, Iowa, under the name

echo. & the poems write themselves:

echoes of the Republic for which it stands.

the workers sit. the workers are the best

poets. five years from now will take over

the whole joint, fire the ceo

rename the company: New Era

build a worker-owned co-op

on this day, capitalism lost.

The Night the Modern Wing Was Bombed

February 22, 2010

a 44-foot mural on a 50-foot wall in 14 minutes

during a blizzard at 3 in the morning. caught

security, cpd, the whole city, yawning

slippin, sleeping. writers plottin, creepin

geared up: night vision, fat caps, krylon

in knapsacks, backpacks, bandanna face masks.

fame seekin, names flying in night, not white

game tweakin. limestone brick wall, spray that

new modern wing, dumb loot, schools closed

art cut, this the place that / nothing new. 18 bucks

on public land impossible for the public view.

outside where the public view, outside

where the public do. the anonymous wrote

Modern Art above the student entrance

free class, public school. Made U Look

clean ass / hand style, this ain’t /no other crew.

the news peeped game, internets, blogs too.

the museum in they feelings, don’t want discourse

bout what the arts will do or what artists do

or why so few Chicagoans hang in the museum

why only dead white motherfuckers on the wall

so few painters of Color, who painting with color

bang the mausoleum / why it cost so much

why the art sucks / why they keep art

for the few, away from the many

modern art bandits / pulled off

the heist of the century. after the statute

of limitations / come get me / we gon build

a statue without limits, wave a W

flag & burn an L in the entry.

When King Louie First Heard the Word Chiraq

Summer 2010

it was so hot

freezers became              furnaces.

all the cheese

melted from spicy chips.

eveybody’s hands were red.

the air

a sleeping bag

of blood.

shoes dangled on telephone wires

like missiles

toes

tigers. pick one

block everybody

know somebody

who not

a body

anymore.

King Louie

must’ve been coming out the bag

of a crown royal, purple velour wrapped

round his hand, bands, knots, a split

swisher, sweet about his mane of wool.

eyes a flame, feet dipped in Bronze

nikes like the ville, the fire. this time

a kid might’ve said it slick.

someone’s lil cousin making

a geopolitical assessment,

a vernacular ingenious flip

addressing the amount

of violence & occupying forces

responsible for the bodies

& militarization of the block,

for food deserts & desert eagles,

a critical pronouncement

countering the myth

of intervention & the war

on drugs, some little body

dropped

this Chiraq

out the mouth

like a screwdriver,

running from forces

better funded & more

insidious & sadistic.

& King Louie

mighta waited for the block

to clear, for the heat to dissipate

like october, the lights to chill

til dusk, as this shiny gem

laid in the street like someone

lost a dead

president but didn’t know it.

he scooped it in his pocket.

touched its smooth Black earth

like obsidian, this history & death

he held close, anticipating the right

moment to share, to say it like a spell,

a whisper he plucked from air & was keeping

for the fall

to come

An Elegy for Dr. Margaret Burroughs

November 22, 2010

if you did not etch metal into Black ink

if you did not travel to learn with the Mexican muralists

if you & Charlie did not think African history

important to re/member & re/present in Black light

Black thought, Black ideas in Black minds

in Black brains

if you did not build an institution in your house & basement

if you did not have a door don l. lee could open

cuz he needed someone              to talk to

if you were not here, Black Arts wouldn’t have been

mothered in this city. the wall of respect

wouldn’t have risen & burned

in the imagination of the South Side

if you were not here, no AfriCOBRA

no South Side Community Arts Center

no institutions, no memory & images

of girls at their birthday or portraits

of Du Bois & Malcolm & heroes

whi-te cubes wouldn’t hold

if you were not here, no honest portrayal of Beauty

nothing authentic, no celebration

of African forms

if you & Ms. Brooks were not

classmates & sisters:

no OBAC

no Carolyn Rodgers

no Angela Jackson

no Walter Bradford

if you were not here, no Black language

no Black poetic, no ritual song

in this segregated Chicago

the lineage is you

& Ms. Brooks

& Haki

& hip-hop

& ALL

pro-Black centered words

which is to say true

words for once that stay

telling it how it is.

ALL the voices needed

you nurtured

if you were not here,

ALL those words & images

ALL those pro-Black celebratory songs

ALL the poets you mother tongued,

ALL the painters’ hands you poured kool-aid colors in

if you were not here, generations of american artists would not be.

you rescued us from english class

you took some off the block, posted on the corner

you told us to dream & imagine & build

our legacies on the shoulders of those before

you made us believe Art is a language people need

you lived among the people

Bronzeville whirling & warping your doorstep

a mess of family & pigeons

a house full of gems & germs

you were always doing your job

getting our minds right

telling the next generation (& the generation after & after that)

to be about something, this is what you left

& you left so much

& you will always be

& you will always be       here

in a purple caftan & headdress

in acid mikes with no socks on

you stayed fresh like that

& you left Us the desire to be fresh

to make & tell

& re/tell

& re/make

& re/main

& re/member

& re/present

always

here, you are

the heart             of the story/city

in order to re/member ourselves

we must             speak

your name

A Dedication to the Inaugural Poet

May 16, 2011 for Ms. Chanel Sosa

after reading at the mayor’s inauguration

the poet is unimpressed. backstage

w/ secret service & bureaucratic aides

she is on the phone texting her boo

who is twenty w/ three kids & three baby

mamas. a light-skinned GD

w/ green eyes. she is eighteen. Black

Dominican y Colombian w/ an accent

everyone loves. she’s an alternative

high school senior who got her hair did

on the West Side the day before; streaks

of some electric moon & spiked bangs.

her mother is not here. nor her siblings.

the last time she saw her father, he told her

he would kill her.

in the procession line

after the ceremony, the poet waits

to be taken to city hall to stand

with multi-hued children the mayor

photo-ops in front of. vice-president

joe biden grabs her hand, says he really felt her

poem (you can see in the video joe’s real).

the new old mayor daley brushes by

without a word. gets stuck in the traffic of dark

suits & backs into the poet as if she’s not there.

he’s posing with the 9-year-old white girl who played

america the beautiful on violin.

the poet is big & grown & not cute

on stage. she is beautiful tributing the river

she swims: Brooks & Sandburg, invoking

Algren & Etta James, a realist blues, the most

honest utterance this day.

the poet is undaunted in the line of aldermen.

unmoved by the mayor’s wife’s congratulations.

she knows she was asked here to be a flower arrangement.

she knows some lines have been redacted

by press secretaries & homeland security.

she knows backstage she was just another Black girl

the archbishop didn’t say hello to.

she knows in an hour she will take the red line

back to Chatham where there is not a grocery store

or millennium park, where there has not been a new day

in any of her eighteen years.

she will take the train all the way south

where politicians’ promises don’t reach.

at the end of this day

she is still poor & working

even if she’s heading to college

her family will be, her community,

the young men she loves, who she calls

shadows, will remain, without

any of what the mayor’s children have.

Memoir of the Red X

June 27, 2012[15]

after Hebru Brantley

When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.

Exodus 12:13

blood on the door.

red slashes in a white box.

a warning what lurks.

a warring. a target.

an invitation to squat.

a pyre to blaze. a death

knell for neighborhoods

south, west. marks the spot

families were, industry was.

illiterate’s autograph.

mark of danger. great

migration dream catcher.

promise breaker. temporary

detention center before

land grab. body count.

connotes new orleans

homes, haunted. ghosts

here. Malcolm’s memorial.

a red cross inverted

perverted. an emergency

no one scrambles to fix.

Chief Keef’s Epiphany at Lollapalooza

August 4, 2012

from stage

he can see

thousands

crowd surf

in a gated

Grant Park.

land stolen

by those

who mosh pit.

his whole camp

faces the Great

Lake: eyes on

the prize

on water, some

have never seen.

heat rises

from the ground

like fire in the brush

in the streets.

thousands of hands,

bodies bounce around

mouth every word

pink mouths

around every word

pink mouths

around every n-word.

more shit

he don’t

like

Teachers’ Strike in the Chicago Tradition

September 10, 2012

The assault on public education started here. It needs to end here.

Karen Lewis, CTU president

the teachers march in Chicago.

red in the streets again, perpetually.

this is a union town, after all

Most radical of American cities:[16]

Nelson Algren would say

this a fight against a mayor

who sold the unions out

to nafta & the clinton white house.

the teachers’ strike

in the Chicago tradition

allied with trade unionists

& Pullman porters. in solidarity

with the Haymarket martyrs

& Republic Windows workers.

the teachers honor those who died

in the 1937 memorial day massacre

when cops shot steelworkers.

they honor those who build & built

the country, who ensured the eight-hour day.

in the name of:

Lucy Parsons

Albert Parsons

& Rudy Lozano

in the name of:

Gene Debs

Mother Jones

Addie Wyatt

Jane Addams &

The Pullman Porters

in the name of Studs Terkel

& his red socks

in solidarity, he rocks from the grave

& would’ve been on the picket line

today, with the teachers

in the long haul

standing with the many

standing with the teachers

firmly rooted in the Chicago tradition:

on the shoulders of giants

who knocked down goliath

fighting the good fight

for the future of All

During Ramadan the Gates of Heaven Are Open

July 14, 2013[17]

the day after not guilty

a sunday, during Ramadan

a town hall for young people

deliberately marginalized.

they assert themselves at the center

of public discourse. of course

where they belong, have always

been. the wooden stage

painted Black in a second-floor

loft overlooking Milwaukee Avenue

& Division Street.

two Muslim women

take the stage. one

after the other. one

in a headscarf. one

not.

Ashley

survived the foster-care system

was adopted by a hip-hop mother

in Uptown & kinda looks white

but who knows, really. she converted

to Islam in high school. a super volunteer

at IMAN, the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.

she was unsure what to say

but decided to speak

from the heart. when she heard

the verdict she cried & dry heaved

cuz there was nothing inside to throw up.

she is weeping now, telling a room

of young people, who gathered here

cuz they had nowhere else to go,

during Ramadan the gates of heaven

are open. she is fasting & disciplined

like the work & organizing needs to be.

Farwa is Pakistani

in all-Black everything.

she too did not want to speak

but was moved to do so.

this young woman who weeps

open & often, a chronic lament

& heartache,

is poised today. mourning

in crisis, righteous

she is

moved to tell the story of Ashura,

a day of fasting & rage

where a community does not say salaam.

there is no peace today

it is ok

to rage today

to pray today

for patience.

these two women

american muezzin

young & brave

& calling us to adhan

to salat, to pray

where we gather:

Allahu Akbar!

in the name of Emmett Till

in the name of Trayvon Martin

Allahu Akbar!

in the name of Rekia Boyd

in the name of Oscar Grant

Allahu Akbar!

in the name of Fred Hampton

in the name of the many names we cannot name

Allahu Akbar!

Allahu Akbar!

Ms. Devine Explains the Meaning of Modern Art: A Found Poem

Spring 2014

Veteran Art Institute security guard Cookie Devine in the Christopher Williams exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago regarding the Bouquet for Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo.

at first i didn’t know what it was. just a room with a picture in it. but today a high school group come in & i’m at the other end & gettin worried like i’ma haveta quiet them cuz you know, they rustlin. but once they come past the wall & see this empty room & the lights is dark, they turn back & see there’s a picture of flowers on the wall, just one picture, so it mus mean somethin. the students, well they get to quiet. it jus transforms them like they at a funeral or somethin. they shoulders go slack, heads drop in remorse, they rememberin.

i heard one lady say, one of my co-workers, i can’t remember exactly what she say but she say, while we passin on shifts, that the flowers are for friends of his who died real young. well this is my opinion, but in Chicago we know what that is. so when kids come into this room & it’s uncluttered like a funeral parlor it’s supposed to mean the time & space you need to mourn. the white & little light in here is supposed to mean you can think different bout the person who not here anymore. the flowers in that picture is supposed to mean something beautiful, some kind of memory that’s there but’ll fade away, like the flowers will.

& the students in that room are dead quiet, like they prayin or somethin. i seen it happen. they might not know the artist’s name or whatever but they feel what’s going on, cuz they goin thru it theyself. they all lost somebody & in my opinion that’s somethin, they can respect.

Two Cities Celebrate Independence Day

July 4–7, 2014[18]

1

midwest weekenders

gather at the lakefront.

blue eyes over navy pier.

the breeze has ease,

distant lite jazz. a cacophony

of calm & citronella.

the sky on fire above

the mighty Michigan

boasts. penthouses,

sailboats stock sun-

burnt faces alight in laughter

& lite beer. a lightness

here. a whiteness.

a luxury to hear blasts

& not flinch or think

someone you love is not.

here is not a land of blood

or body. all remains, remain

well. deposit box inheritance.

the future a right. bright. awash

in light. the holiday is every

day

2

neighborhoods will bloom tonight.

mini-arsenals stockpiled from Indiana.

smoke & fire in the streets & alleys.

corner boys & working fathers make

the sky burn. the light on the block

warms the faces of little ones, mothers

on stoops finally sitting for a moment

to watch dusk turn the color of candy.

bustelo cans are cannons. roman candles

in county men’s hands launch fireballs

into the dark, raging against the stars.

downtown the 1812 overture will whisper

gently over the water. but here quarter sticks

of dynamite bass drum a requiem for the fire

crackers take & for those who won’t make it

tonight:

Warren Robison, 16, will be shot 20

times by police with his hands in the air.

tonight

Pedro Rios, 14, will run like a boy

until the cops fire two in his back.

small armies overrun the streets.

free & aimless, makeshift orchestras

of whistles, bottles, bombs. the war

of each day, reenacted every

night.

We Charge Genocide

November 13, 2014

...the Chicago Police Department is in violation of Articles 2, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 of the Convention of Torture, through the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of youth of color in Chicago.

We Charge Genocide UN Shadow Report

in front of the world eight

Black, Brown, Queer young folk

rock braids & locs & matching t-shirts

that read: The Chicago Police Dept. Killed

Dominique Franklin like they did Fred.

in the hall of the United Nations

for half an hour leaning into each other

heads bent in prayer & power calling to Damo,

their homie, tasered while handcuffed

outside a Walgreens with some candy

or toothpaste in his pocket & who is now

no more. this for those who are no more.

for 30 minutes in silence, hands clasped to fists

raised to heaven like John Carlos & Tommie Smith,

the time Rekia Boyd laid in the street

after an off-duty cop shot her in the head.

again & always there is Black death & today

it receives its proper name, its one true

name. Chicago youth stand on the world

stage to mourn & proclaim. to pronounce

formally, finally, in no uncertain terms:

Atoning for the Neoliberal in All or rahm emanuel as the Chicken on Kapparot

written on the eve & day of Yom Kippur, September 22–23, 2015

Do you call that a fast, a day when the Lord is favorable? No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock the fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free.

Isaiah 58: 5-6

you are the first jewish mayor of Chicago

but have not lit one yahrzeit candle

for people murdered by the police.

you vacation in montana with the governor,

bring your family to Chile on a whim

& never worry about crossing borders

or encountering their patrolmen

or the rent upon return.

your grandparents sought refuge here.

escaping those trying to end them.

they came, worked, learned, created

a life that enabled your parents to raise you

in the suburbs: the immigrant face of the american dream.

you dismantle the same system from which your family benefited:

union pay, livable wages, park space safe enough to play outside

arts funding to take ballet, a decent well-rounded public education.

the same ladder your family climbed

you kick the rungs from.

if the schools, housing, health care

trauma centers & corners that cause trauma

are fair across this flat, segregated land—

then eat today. every day there is a harvest

on the carcass of the city for sale. the satiated

carve at a distance, plan, map & redistrict

with careless indifference. how many times

have you been to Kenwood, Woodlawn

North Lawndale. what are the names of the people

you know there. what homes have you sat in.

how can you fast

this week, when food

was refused by grandmothers

& educators & organizers

in your backyard, in the front

lawn of a school Chief Keef attended

in a neighborhood you militarize;

more guns & police your solution

to poverty or an extermination strategy.

how can you fast

when you couldn’t stand

in the same room with

those on hunger strike.

in a public forum

you don’t listen.

you are the antithetical

Studs Terkel

this is not the city he loved

to listen to, not the city

your grandparents were promised

where is your apology

for sending so many jobs elsewhere

for privileging your children’s future

& pillaging others’

what do you know of labor

& no savings account & counting

pennies for a pass, for permission to move

or see a movie or museum in this city

of no access & grand canyons of inequity.

your middle name is Israel

it’s come to mean apartheid

in the city, you are mayor

& in Palestine, the city

your family colonized.

there is no safety

said my G-d

for the wicked[19]

for the divvier of cities

for the divider of nations

for the ignorer of horror

for the builder of walls

atone for the smug assuredness

atone for the maintenance of two cities

stratified & unrecognizable to the other

atone for the bounty of the north side

the scarcity of the south

the want of the west

atone for the erasure of the public

school, space, housing, parking

atone for the centrism, the move right

the kowtow to corporations

atone for the inconceivable income disparity

between those funding your campaign

& those over whom you reign

atone for the city’s change

its whitewash & removable

workers who used to make it

work by working

in jobs with pensions

& benefits

atone for the benefits we have

by merely being white

on the north side of the city

country where that is enough

to make you safe & not think

about driving a car or going

for a jog or walk outside

atone for the rite to the city

that’s for some, not for all

not for real

israel means may G-d prevail

& we pray that’s real, for real

amen

400 Days

October 20, 2014—November 24, 2015

after Nazim Hikmet

in 400 days

i’ve gone thru 3 journals

worked

on 2 books, a play & a movie

about house music.

i left a lover

& found another.

lost 2 teeth

got 4 stitches, broke

a finger in a fight

& sat in the barber shop for 24 fades

mostly from Rob at Chicago’s Best

except when i’m traveling & i’ve learned

not to get a haircut while traveling.

i’ve had students graduate

grow hair on their face, had sex

for the 1st time. some are starting

college, a few have

been shot:

1 thru the lung

he lived, made a mix tape.

1 in a parked car

waiting to see his son

who will now have to wait

forever.

the city has opened

hundreds

of new restaurants, private social clubs

closed public schools

put on a halloween parade

an irish day parade

a columbus day parade

a new year’s celebration

erected condos

targets

& never once

apologized.

there have been thousands

of masterpieces

artists painted

on the streets

for the people. but

the city removed

cuz art is racialized

& the city

thinks some artists

criminal.

i started

eating chicken again

in the last 400 days, the doctor said

less sugar.

the city is chicken

to apologize

& will never say anything sweet.

the city makes Black

a target. a video game

a city of zombies, the walking dead.

for 400 days cpd, the state’s attorney

the mayor’s office hid evidence

tape, bullets

& didn’t apologize

for any of it.

400 days ago

toddlers were not

yet & now cry thru the night.

they see a city

of ghosts. walking

Laquan, the other

way, still shot

16 times.

no life

in the eyes

of cops, anita. mayor rahm

looks dead

into the camera

& lies

for 400 days

the cubs threatened

victory

but justice

will have to wait

til next year

The Night the Cubs Win the World Series

November 2, 2016

my pops chariots a drunken lady

home safely. they pull to the side

of the road in the dark of West Irving

Park & listen to one out, then two, then

weep at the blast of the improbable

come.

i too have tears when talking

to him finally. he is in the melee

of the night trying to celebrate, trying

to hustle the loot for whatever number

mortgage he’s on, before the banks pounce

like Kris Bryant on a grounder & throw him out.

we imagine this is for all the fathers

weeping, the mothers’ names that chalk

the wall, the grandparents who couldn’t

be here. the generations who loved

without hardware, but this is

the arrogance of the north side

incarnate. the double play, double

standard turned over like property.

The Cubs did not win the World Series

tonight. a game in north america maybe

the nation’s pastime. but the curse is

not lifted in the shadow of the bloodiest

weekend of the year

though the north side

celebrates its constant win. its distance

from the south & west. a delight, a dream

team that’s not, but reads so white,

a side so white, they’re dumping beer

on each other’s heads to metaphor

the excess. what world are we celebrating.

all week long the minstreled indian

smiles from the arm of the Cleveland

hitters as Natives are mauled by dogs

& gas in Cannon Ball, North Dakota

defending their home base & water supply.

the mayor keeps popping up

on camera smiling like a jackass.

the owner upholds the trophy

in the club house & writes checks

to the campaigns of fascists

in the mist of champagne.

the blue flag flying the W

stands for whiteness & blue lives.

i can’t celebrate the one side

or one story. not for a single

night or 108 years or 180.

i can’t cheer for this

national pastime

of curses fixed

for generations;

redlined, red blooded

american & perennial.

Chicago Has My Heart

March 4, 2017

don’t ask me to leave

don’t force me to go

when the coasts call

when the rents rise

when the city i know

is unrecognizable.

it’s mine, not alone

not to own.

Chicago has my heart

at the lake, on the train

in the first days of spring

that remind us why we live

here, at all, have bodies

can use them outside the cold

restrictions of clothing, the confines

of neighborhood.

Chicago has my heart

the land i’m most confident:

give me an address, i’ll get us

there. i know the grid, blocks

got people in these streets

students whose family

run the breakfast spot

on 79th near Haki

who is still here

building temples

to Black lives, monuments

to Mama Gwendolyn

my family is here. my father,

six blocks from me in Albany Park,

the mayor of the city’s broke dreams

he holds them in his growing belly

his breaking heart, falling

asleep in front of the television

chatting thru the night in his taxi

the city with money calls an uber,

he drives new residents to wherever

they wish to go. thank G-d

for the hustle, the hustler, my father

the kindest, most incompetent

businessman here. he doesn’t

swindle or cheat, he is honest

& fair, what a sucker

this city makes of sweet

men.

like me

i guess, i just

want justice

& someone

to read poems to

to u

Chicago, my heart

is all the people

who make it

who are making it

barely, in the 77 hoods.

i hate the viaducts

the millionaires

who urban plan them

from the suburbs

they resurrect

downtown

Chicago you have my heart

my whole history, my people

you saved, seeking refuge here

tucked in apartments in Ukrainian

Village & North Lawndale.

you saved them from history

while destroying others’.

my mother left. my brother

moved. my friends gone:

too much rent, debt

you killed some off

you are a ghost mound

i stalk, still, Chicago

you have my heart

split in two

like the city

& stories you tell

but i am one

not two

i am one

second will not do

you can’t continue

to break us

in two, in remade

refurbished, renewed

models for the few.

Chicago has my heart

but

my head

my hands

my body

with the people

who build

who have a limit

& can break

& tear

it down & stop it

from becoming

what it’s becoming

what is it becoming

Chicago has my heart

but

the hearts of those

who call this home

who root & champion

the losers & villains

who run this place

who put on for the shitty

pizza & arctic weather

we will turn our backs

on the very land we are

locked in, turn our backs

on the capital wage-slaves

you’ve made us become.

we will burn your memory

in effigy & house dance

in the afterglow

we rise, Chicago

this body

politic will rise

our fire will burn

again

Notes

1. 1 X names of the Native signees: To-pen-e-bee, his x mark; Sau-ko-noek, his x mark; Che-che-bin-quay, his x mark; Joseph, his x mark; Wah-mix-i-co, his x mark; Ob-wa-qua-unk, his x mark; N-saw-way-quet, his x mark; Puk-quech-a-min-nee, his x mark; Nah-che-wine, his x mark; Ke-wase, his x mark; Wah-bou-seh, his x mark; Mang-e-sett, his x mark; Caw-we-saut, his x mark; Ah-be-te-ke-zhic, his x mark; Pat-e-go-shuc, his x mark; E-to-wow-cote, his x mark; Shim-e-nah, his x mark; O-chee-pwaise, his x mark; Ce-nah-ge-win, his x mark; Shaw-waw-nas-see, his x mark; Shab-eh-nay, his x mark; Mac-a-ta-o-shic, his x mark; Squah-ke-zic, his x mark; Mah-che-o-tah-way, his x mark; Cha-ke-te-ah, his x mark; Me-am-ese, his x mark, Shay-tee, his x mark; Kee-new, his x mark; Ne-bay-noc-scum, his x mark; Naw-bay-caw, his x mark; O’Kee-mase, his x mark; Saw-o-tup, his x mark; Me-tai-way, his x mark; Na-ma-ta-way-shuc, his x mark; Shaw-waw-nuk-wuk, his x mark; Nah-che-wah, his x mark; Sho-bon-nier, his x mark; Me-nuk-quet, his x mark; Chis-in-ke-bah, his x mark; Mix-e-maung, his x mark; Nah-bwait, his x mark; Sen-e-bau-um, his x mark; Puk-won, his x mark; Wa-be-no-say, his x mark; Mon-tou-ish, his x mark; No-nee, his x mark; Mas-quat, his x mark; Sho-min, his x mark; Ah-take, his x mark; He-me-nah-wah, his x mark; Che-pec-co-quah, his x mark; Mis-quab-o-no-quah, his x mark; Wah-be-Kai, his x mark; Ma-ca-ta-ke-shic, his x mark; Sho-min, his x mark; She-mah-gah, his x mark; O’ke-mah-wah-ba-see, his x mark; Na-mash, his x mark; Shab-y-a-tuk, his x mark; Ah-cah-o-mah, his x mark; Quah-quah, tah, his x mark; Ah-sag-a-mish-cum, his x mark; Pa-mob-a-mee, his x mark; Nay-o-say, his x mark; Ce-tah-quah, his x mark; Ce-ku-tay, his x mark; Sauk-ee, his x mark; Ah-quee-wee, his x mark; Ta-cau-ko, his x mark; Me-shim-e-nah, his x mark; Wah-sus-kuk, his x mark; Pe-nay-o-cat, his x mark; Paymaw-suc, his x mark; Pe-she-ka, his x mark; Shaw-we-mon-e-tay, his x mark; Ah-be-nab, his x mark; Sau-sau-quas-see, his x mark.

2. 2 Opening of the Union Stockyard.

3. 3 The last writings of Albert Parsons, published in the Alarm, November 5, 1887, a week before his execution.

4. 4 Italics are phrases from Debs’s speech upon his release from prison November 23, 1895, quoted in the Chicago Chronicle & Karl Marx’s Capital.

5. 5 A section of German criminal code that made homosexuality a crime from 1871 to 1994.

6. 6 Founder of the political Latino street organization the Young Lords.

7. 7 Division Street: America is published.

8. 8 A line from Haki Madhubuti’s poem “The Wall.”

9. 9 A line from Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Wall.”

10. 10 “The Hawk” refers to Chicago’s cold wind. Used in the Chicago Defender, October 20, 1936, and famously in Lou Rawls’s 1967 Dead End Street.

11. 11 Language removed from the cityofchicago.org website.

12. 12 The demolition of Cabrini Green housing begins.

13. 13 Housing and Urban Development begins and ends demolition of the Ida B. Wells Homes in Bronzeville.

14. 14 City Council passes a rave ordinance, a stricter enforcement of the juice-bar ordinance of April 1, 1987.

15. 15 City Council passes an ordinance marking “dangerous buildings” with red Xs in order to warn first responders about “structural conditions” in “buildings that could create danger for crews responding to fires. These conditions include weak truss or other roofing systems, missing mortar, rotted or damaged timbers.”

16. 16 Big Bill Haywood was a socialist and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, started in Chicago in 1904.

17. 17 The day after a Florida jury finds the murderer of Trayvon Martin not guilty.

18. 18 Eight-two people were shot this weekend. Fourteen of them died.

19. 19 Isaiah 57:21.

About the BreakBeat Poets Series

The BreakBeat Poets series, curated by Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall, is committed to work that brings the aesthetic of hip-hop practice to the page. These books are a cipher for the fresh, with an eye always to the next. We strive to center and showcase some of the most exciting voices in literature, art, and culture.

BreakBeat Poets Series titles include:

The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall

This is Modern Art: A Play, Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval

My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, Aja Monet

Electric Arches, Eve Ewing (forthcoming)

Black Girl Magic, edited by Mahogany Browne, Jamila Woods, and Idrissa Simmonds (forthcoming)

Illustration Credits

Illustrators:

Max Sansing

Troy Scat

Hebru Brantley

Paul Branton

Bianca Pastel

Runsy

1. Jean Baptiste Point duSable

illustration by by Max Sansing

2. Gwendolyn Brooks

illustration by Max Sansing

3. Lorraine Hansberry

illustration by Max Sansing

4. Muddy Waters

illustration by Troy Scat

5. Sun Ra

illustration by Hebru Brantley

6. Studs Terkel

illustration by Troy Scat

7. Fred Hampton

illustration by Paul Branton

8. Haki Madhubuti

illustration by Troy Scat

9. Ron Hardy

illustration by Bianca Pastel

10. Rudy Lozano

illustration by Runsy

11. Harold Washington

illustrated by Hebru Brantley

12. Common

illustrated by Paul Branton

13. Ida B. Wells-Barnett

illustrated by Bianca Pastel

14. The Mothers & Grandmothers

illustrated by Runsy

15. Kanye West

illustrated by Hebru Brantley

16. King Louie

illustrated by Runsy

17. Dr. Margaret Burroughs

illustrated by Paul Branton

18. Chief Keef

illustrated by Bianca Pastel

Acknowledgments

teamwork makes the dream work. i lean heavy on my community, my family forged in blood & fire. Moms, the fighter. Pops, the storyteller. Aunt Joyce, who has transitioned, my Chicago guide to the art hustle. she loved the city, its artists, put on for them & carved spaces for them to grind & shine. my Uncle Steve, the writer & historian, who loves NYC like i do this burg, a civic pride like Jane Jacobs. my brother Eric, the mensch & disciplined educator & father. my sister Elyse, the who manages to put up with my family with grace & light. Addison & Colin, niece & nephew, who are so different & hilarious & lovely & free. Cheryl & Sasha, y’all a badass, amazing duo.

Young Chicago Authors (YCA) is a home & house i built with the many who are there and who have left and who return. Rebecca Hunter, it would be impossible without your vision & dedication to the growth & integrity of this work. To the staff & team at YCA i am indebted to your belief in making the city anew, again, a more better & fresher space for all.

Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is a movement. And at this point there have been tens of thousands and more who have participated and made it so. If you care & believe young people, young artists can shape and shift and sing the world as it is & as it will be, this is a space for you to dream, too. This fountain of youth, of freshness & could-give-a-fuck-lessness & care the most, i rock with y’all too tough: the poets & coaches & teachers & volunteers & thousand partners & festival staff it takes to pull off the impossible, salutes.

a generous partner in this work makes this book, A People’s History of Chicago, possible, The Lannan Foundation and the residency i was able to take in Marfa, texas, where this book really came together. I had a month of isolation, to think & read & write & edit & invest in this project. It was the first time in my life someone said this space is for you to make, that’s it, no song & dance, no also teach fifty classes, just create, what a privilege & essential gift & honor.

in texas, i was writing essentially two books & Nate Marshall said to just focus on one. He is the editor, homie & partner in BreakBeats & LTAB/YCA scheming. The student has become the teacher & i am eternally grateful to learn from such an incredible poet & man.

Fatimah Ashgar put eyes on the script & clipped & made essential edits & suggestions & made it more & better. She is an artist with so many talents, who’s also an incredible cheerleader, an encourager & champion in your corner.

Jamila Woods is Bonnie. My ride-or-die aesthetic thought partner. There is more music cuz of her syntactical suggestions & presence on the planet.

i wouldn’t be alive if not for the brotherhood i share with Idris Goodwin, Hip-Hop’s August Wilson. We shit-talked & dreamed a way to change the whole canon.

there are countless other comrades & brothers & sisters in this work. Adam Mansbach, Angel Nafis are two dumb talented & dumb people i love the most.

the folks at Haymarket Books are squad. Anthony Arnove & Julie Fain trust me to create & to have such high-quality brilliant people say yes to your work, your inner turned out, is a blessing. Jim Plank is as down as they come. Sarah Grey is nice af with the editorial eye. Thank you Nisha & Rachel & Caroline & the whole team who make this book & all these words possible.

the artists who blessed these poems with beautiful tributes & portraits i’m forever down for. Hebru Brantley is the homie & GOAT. His downness astounding. His team, Max Sansing, Troy Scat & Bianca Pastel are stupid talents whose work I love & look forward to seeing more & more of. Paul Branton is a true school head whose brush & pen tribute the city of hustlers. Runsy is a former student, whose style & talent have no ceilings.

my mentors are my guides: Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dorn, Rick Kogan, Haki Madhubuti. many informally, but these Chicago institutions have paved a way for me to walk in the world: gatherers of story & song & with a sense of fairness & justice that is unbreakable.

there is a crew around me that make A People’s History of Chicago real. Brett Neiman has designed every one of my covers & is a renaissance man of the people. Mickayla Johnson, Tammy Job & Nick Ward are out here keeping me grinding & on time. Tara Mahadevan is spreading the word like bo$$ & is high-key the creative director of the whole project. It is a pleasure & honor to work with Ryan at Biz3. & there are many more i am sure i am forgetting & also they many to come. The plan to make this book utilitarian, a spoon or shank or lifeboat. I plan on doing at least 180 readings in 365 days & workshops surrounding the book to have many folk i interact with add their voices & stories to the narrative of this great & troubled city.

so i thank you, the reader, in advance, for holding it down & pushing us forward.

About Haymarket Books

Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.”

We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day, which gave us May Day, the international workers’ holiday, reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. These struggles continue today across the globe—struggles against oppression, exploitation, hunger, and poverty.

It was August Spies, one of the Martyrs targeted for being an immigrant and an anarchist, who predicted the battles being fought to this day. “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement,” Spies told the judge, “then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.”

We could not succeed in our publishing efforts without the generous financial support of our readers. Many people contribute to our project through the Haymarket Sustainers program, where donors receive free books in return for their monetary support. If you would like to be a part of this program, please contact us at info@haymarketbooks.org.

Shop our full catalog online at www.haymarketbooks.org.

Also Available from Haymarket Books

Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine

Remi Kenazi

L-Vis Lives: Racemusic Poems

Kevin Coval

Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedon Fighter

Craig Hodges with Rory Fanning, foreword by Dave Zirin

Lucy Parsons: An American Revolutionary

Carolyn Ashbaugh

Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%

Kari Lydersen

People Wasn’t Made to Burn:

A True Story of Housing, Race, and Murder in Chicago

Joe Allen

Schtick: These Are the Poems, People

Kevin Coval

Whiskey of Our Discontent:

Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent

Edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia A. Popoff,

introduction by Sonia Sanchez

Table of Contents

A People's History of Chicago

Foreword by Chance the Rapper

Shikaakwa

lasalle Wrote It Down Wrong

The Father Is a Black Man

The Treaty of Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World

Albert Parsons Can Hang

How to Be Down

The L Gets Open

The white City

Eugene Debs Reads Marx in Prison

Reversing the Flow of the Chicago River

The Great Migration

The Eastland Disaster

The Murder of Eugene Williams

Society for Human Rights (America’s First Gay Rights Organization)

Thomas Dorsey, Gospel’s Daddy

Gwendolyn Brooks Stands in the Mecca

Hansberry vs. Lee

Muddy Waters Goes Electric

Nelson Algren Meets Simone de Beauvoir at the Palmer House

Pickle with a Peppermint Stick

Sun Ra Becomes a Synthesizer

hugh hefner, a Play Boy

Mamie Till Bears the Movement

king daley Unfurls His burnham Plan

The Division Street Riots

Martin Luther King Prays in Marquette Park

Studs Terkel Drops a Mixtape

Carl Sandburg Village (Where My Parents Met)

Wall of Respect

AfriCOBRA

The Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton

Don L. Lee Becomes Haki Madhubuti

The Chicago 21 Plan

Leaving Aldine

Ode to Steppin

Disco Demolition

mayor byrne Moves Into & Out of Cabrini Green

Ron Hardy Plays the Record Backwards

The Assassination of Rudy Lozano

Marc Smith Invents the Poetry Slam

Collateral Damage

The Day Harold Died

Patronage

Fresh to Death

Molemen Beat Tapes

Graffiti Blasters: An Erasure (A Buff)

The Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act

The Etymology of Chicago Joe

Common’s Resurrection

The Supreme Court Makes Color Illegal

Erasing the Green

Ida B. Wells Testifies in the Ghost Town

How to Teach Poetry in Chicago Public Schools

Lenard Clark Pedals for Air

Baby Come On: An Ode to Footwork

A Moratorium on the Death Penalty

Praise the House Party

Día de las Madres

Kanye Says What’s on Everybody’s Mind

I Wasn’t in Grant Park when obama Was Elected

Republic Windows Workers Sit In

The Night the Modern Wing Was Bombed

When King Louie First Heard the Word Chiraq

An Elegy for Dr. Margaret Burroughs

A Dedication to the Inaugural Poet

Memoir of the Red X

Chief Keef’s Epiphany at Lollapalooza

Teachers’ Strike in the Chicago Tradition

During Ramadan the Gates of Heaven Are Open

Ms. Devine Explains the Meaning of Modern Art: A Found Poem

Two Cities Celebrate Independence Day

We Charge Genocide

Atoning for the Neoliberal in All or rahm emanuel as the Chicken on Kapparot

400 Days

The Night the Cubs Win the World Series

Chicago Has My Heart

Notes

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgments