Get Your Own, Beautiful

Motel on the moon
number over my head
through the suburbs
just inches from my person
we hover probably not
to these mountains.

Dark cartographer
draw a map
of the great American
tomorrow.

Dusk loves sitting on the porch
so I resemble

counting the truant ocean

and calmly pass the man with an edge.

Officer forever
unravel the world.

A tiny ship is changing clothes,
stop staring at the scene.

And then the quiet post card bled
the heart’s thick beautiful smoke.

Myopia

"Nelson Algren, Wicker Park's great literary giant, once remarked "Chicago is an October sort of city, even in spring". He knew what he was talking about. Year after year spring skittishly arrives on the shores of Lake Michigan in a series of dizzying and ultimately frustrating meteorological peaks and valleys. So deep in winter hibernation are Cook County's citizenry that we are slow to leave our cocoons, distrustful of all sunny February days in the mid-50's, expecting the last blizzard later that very night, the old man's last gasp, the billowing snow and ice sideways blown within the hard bitter wind of our dreams. In February, winter's punishing landscape always lurks in the rearview mirror, just as in October it spans the entire horizon ahead."

-Joe Judd, owner, Myopic Books



Sunday March 25 - Betsy Andrews

Sunday April 29 -Tony Trigilio

Sunday May 13 - Comedic Poetry with Aaron Belz, Daniel Borzutzky, Joyelle McSweeney, Gabriel Gudding, and A.D. Jameson

Sunday June 17 - Aaron Fagan

Present Tense

A thousand noons hatch
at horizon where the
gate sings

I peel my selves
for you to
listen
winds bringing hours
black

You I knew
in a million colors, world

stacks of
nacreous factories

A razor
stubble chin where
constellations crouch

Tiny machines ply
the after-
noon sky, useless as
caves.