American Necropolis # 4


They keep the blues here in a strongbox. In the conventioneers’ memories, all the music is piped in. Local Sporting Events: When the underground canals freeze, the dead play hockey. The puck moves from stick to stick, dances between frozen cattails and sedges, and ramps over ice ridges caught in the sudden pre-winter freeze, which oddly here rises from the south. It’s the dead’s favorite season. Along the banks, residents gather to hear their shouts. Stay in the cold long enough, and the city’s old-timers will regale you with tales of five-minute majors and game misconducts claimed by the dead of the past. “You haven’t seen anything,” they say, “until you’ve seen two six-foot-six dead men wrestle on ice skates. They move with a grace that the living refuse to accommodate.” Cemeteries and Death Culture: The things that are worshipped here are crafted from local metals. The rich are sealed in metal tombs; aluminum remains a sign of money, the detritus of a life lived off the assembly line. Poorer citizens have taken to constructing metallic collages above family graves. Small intricate pieces of metal have refashioned the dead here. Remnants of fenders, radio dials, and fans twisted and dotted into unfinished memorials, public grief. It’s a grief that’s caused many former residents to complain that the dead have become immodest in this city; “their immodesty has become a source of public shame,” one senator argues, sucking water from a metal canteen.


©2012 Garin Cycholl


Garin Cychollʼs recent work includes an adapted screenplay of Cyrusʼ Colterʼs The Hippodrome and The Bonegatherer (Moria Books, 2011), a book-length poem that rethinks the history of Chicagoʼs West Side through the Cook County Hospital Emergency Room. Since 2002, he has been a member of the Jimmy Wynn fiction collaborative.


PoetsArtists Chicago Issue 2012 ~ www.poetsandartists.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136