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This offering is part of the Poetry Flop House Series.
Uptown Chicago, Mon Amour
by Phil West author info
You can't escape: they're always going to call
you the Big Shoulders, always going to give
you up in the smokestack Sandburg voice,
film you in black and white. And there you'll be:
another gritty montage, another patchwork of blue
workshirts and slow-motion fists banging bartops,
signs pointing Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana
as if to say Thick-necked America, we are here
for you, as if to say your life will be a Springsteen
song forever, and the best you can hope for
is to not be a selection from the Nebraska album.
Chicago, you're the type of girl that should
get asked to the prom, but doesn't. No one
understands you. They can dip into the lemon
yellow afternoons of Wrigley and not see it.
They can slip into the Green Mill and sip
themselves half a century back and not see it.
They can see the repetitions of red brick
and not see it, assume that you are nothing
more that median and mean, the America
that went to college and came back to
I am 24. I am a waitress.
I am working on a rebuttal
of Mamet, years too late.
They want you white shirt and tie,
the pretension of not connecting A to C.
They want you diamonding hope
if you cannot be coal. They want you
anywhere but uptown peering out the window
at inbetween.
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Phil West lives in San Antonio with his wife. He runs a weekly poetry slam where people sometimes call him things like "honky." He is a five time Austin Slam Team member and serves on the board of Poetry Slam Inc., a non profit organization supporting poetry slams across the country. Phil's prose work can be found in the Austin Chronicle. He has a The Poetry Flop House Series:
In 1992 I acquired a large, cheap apartment in the weirdly beautiful Uptown neighborhood in Chicago. Dozens of touring artists, mostly poets, crashed there for a night or more. They were on tour, temporarily homeless, too drunk to get home, or had other reasons. When my old place went condo in November 2001, I began soliciting tributes from the talented minds who slept on its beds, couches and floors. A blessing of real estate fate gave me another big Uptown apartment; any poets who flop will pay with poetry.
- Greg Gillam, Fengi editor.
All material copyright the authors, printed with permission.
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