And She Will is a brief, difficult volume. Only twenty-seven pages, it documents author Kwyn Townsend Riley’s “heal[ing] of self inflicted and reactionary wounds” after trauma. In early 2018, within weeks of each other, Riley gave birth to a stillborn son, her fiance ended their engagement, and she attempted suicide. Her second collection of poems explores her explosions of emotion in the time after these events, charting her grief and her journey toward self-compassion.
Living in Chicago often means talking about it near-constantly—a grand, if not always consistent, tradition. One layer of the conversation is the trumpeting of glorious public accomplishments: the tallest skyscrapers, epic lakefront public works projects, no little plans being made. By the same token, Chicagoans seem to take some pleasure in public failure—the more grandiose and conspicuous the better—whether watching a gangster, a governor, or a sports franchise take the proverbial L. It’s a sacred local activity: if an outsider (usually a New Yorker) tries to get in on the action, Chicagoans circle the wagons.
Readers expecting a detailed account of urban coyotes may be surprised by Gavin Van Horn’s new book. The Way of Coyote blends memoir and ecological research in a work of creative non-fiction that explores Chicago’s wilderness and how we live alongside it. The beauty and wonder of urban nature are treated in much the same style as traditional, wilderness-focused nature writing, and Van Horn acknowledges on the first page that his “Plan A” was to live in a cabin somewhere with no cell reception. That plan fell through, however, and instead of lions or wolves, Van Horn finds beauty in the birds and butterflies that call Chicago home.
Patricia Frazier’s Graphite opens with a quote from fellow poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, excerpted from a passage reflecting on the Williams sisters. Rankine says Serena and Venus are “graphite against a sharp white background,” a stark contrast to the accepted homogeneity of professional tennis.
Propter Nos is the yearly journal from True Leap Press. It’s a smartly critical read with an eye toward beauty and a better world, and Volume 2—published October 2017 and excerpted here—circles around the idea of political and emotional exhaustion from a resolutely anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-nationalist perspective. True Leap is currently working on their third issue and providing free copies to incarcerated readers; learn more at trueleappress.com
it’s a honey moon
tonight, they say:
when lovers learn
to take leave.
(a rose moon
or strawberry—
sweet, wet, full.
earth’s blood mirrored
there in her gleaming)
last night there were six gunshots
outside our bar
& tonight they don’t know
if we hear fire works
or loud play
that will kill our children.
I don’t know what to do
about babies in the street
so I lay my crystals in the
moonlight to be bathed.
I would rather
feel witchy: see
hard earth as clean.
baby a black cat
has a wet rose tongue
too. or did you think
a tense superstition
could roll over
& lay its soft belly
bare for yr light?
for Rekia Boyd & all who loved her
1990-2012
the afternoon your best friend’s
sister’s murderer
was acquitted of all charges
I was sitting in f******* Starbucks watching
20 or so black boys from the high school
running down State St. w/ the new
exhilaration of a bird gone to flight even at
the price of a fight or a weapon. I froze
& stood feeling the fear break the window as
the cops were called & the white man sat
outside, smirking & sipping on his iced Venti
Whatever chatting w/ the undercover
white cop in her gleaming black car
the boys dispersed, & no one was shot
though I was crying in the bathroom at this
seeming inevitability.
I was wearing thick white & thin lilac,
quartz & rosewood on my wrist
it had felt like a time
for
pastels
you said you loved
seeing yogis squirm
to keep up, their bodies
nearly breaking. I thought
it is easy to love the wrenching or
the obviously tragic it is harder
to love the uncertain the look on
a face when it is deciding whether
to freeze or run or die or kill. it is
harder to love the ambiguity of
forgiveness. your never knowing
if you had to or were right to
& what will come of it
the judge said,
the law said,
it was not reckless manslaughter
but “beyond reckless”
so he could not continue
he said,
this is a place for reasoned
decisions & her brother
started screaming
I was wondering how
to be
on this planet
if it will always revolve around
such a pompous & burning
form of light but it is not as if
we didn’t choose
to be here
shouting at the detail
wailing in ambiguous light
What do I see?
Who the hell am I?
I look in my mirror and wish the person I see could become clearer,
But not even my contacts can fix that.
I fear that maybe I am out of touch myself,
And until I figure out who I am, no one can touch me.
No one will leave trails for me to find.
When I look in my mirror.
No one will part my legs like the sea and make a home out of me,
Because I have not yet built a home for myself.
I don’t like the thought of telling you that I belong to you.
Why does the thought of me being property entice you?
Who do you see?
Who the hell am I to you?
Your eyes swell with greed and desire.
You are not the man I need.
No.
You are someone else.
Stop trying to make your home in me,
Because you know that you wouldn’t even welcome yourself inside.
The taste of the vodka is strong and burning not smooth like the Patron, I had gotten use to. Without it getting through the day would be harder. It seemed like the million dollars flowed as easily and surely as the Dimitri going into my breakfast glass. For the life of me I don’t remember where it all went.
Zakkiyyah Najeebah
Start here, with Tarnynon Onumonu’s ode to Chicago’s Free Range youth, the ones who might not be welcome in the Loop.