Garin Cycholl
Midwestern Landscape #110
after Art Sinsabaugh
NORTH AVENUE
BEACH: CHILDREN
& RAILING [Water,
Chicago] steel is
a ribbon is confetti
is a child’s toe a
knee bent at five
o’clock some
Seine of the Mid-
west and we are
all children shadows
behind fingers a
striped shirt, a dive
into the air bathers
and ashcans in
formation the
waterline a cuff
and picket waves
running through
white
“Eleanor”
after Harry and Eleanor Callahan
before he’d picked up motion
pictures, they threw the city
against itself—some Eleanor, not
abstract, but substantial—some
trace of ourselves torso
strung or flecked with bricks
or grasses—the sky gets into
it, too
these aren’t experiments
or landscapes or a matter of
words (the light never “lands”
or “uncovers” or “washes”) the
light’s a tattoo—shadow, sub-
stance—the city, a geometry
without an eye to thought
the city’s pure light gone
crazy for itself some
textured isolate, like
concrete bleeding
light, a voice in the
lake, skin against
shoulder
Garin Cycholl teaches writing and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also works as co-editor of Near South, a journal of experimental poetry, fiction, and drama. His other recent work will appear this spring with Admit2, Keep Going, and Seven Corners. He is author of Nightbirds (moria books 2006), and Blue Mound to 161, a book-length poem on geological and historical displacements in Southern Illinois (Pavement Saw Press 2005).