Issue 10 – Summer 2006 – Garin Cycholl

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).

 

 

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