Poetry

By

Jan Wiezorek

Chicago Turf

Whenever gouging

car wheels slash

land expects

your insides

to eat themselves

of ravenous fear

rutting you

with sounds

for spinning tires

cutting live sod

snapping grasses

from their roots

in rolling screeches

by bushes rimming

treed crescents

internal rhythms

that cleat

dying lawns

reverbing grounds

in unsettled turf

where surface sounds

place you

where we sit

in calm sharp bullets

of audio files

holding your insides

on plain grassland

ripping blocks away

stripping

quiet layers

from your

chesty sod

Waiting for the Bus

gave me a swaying vision of a man with a marred cane on our high-rise elevator, and I asked, “What happened?” “I fell on the carpet and broke my arm and opposite knee,” he said, transferring weight from his arm to his cane during our moving exchange. Nearly my age and often on trips to Italy, he is the one I frequently saw at his garden plot, where the ripe tomatoes he had planted from seed went missing, cupped among fingers of nearby women—those Polish thieves. Then, I heard how the fall reduced him to such care that he couldn’t raise himself from the toilet seat without aid. And as I waited for the bus in the damp in the Loop, I recalled how I walk with leg muscles so strong that I can’t imagine a trip as a trap I would snare. But I sit on this bus, condensed to unsettledness in my seat, as the pain has begun in the index finger I use to type out these words, like slippery grief so firmly sliced from tomatoes that the seeds have fallen into the wrong hands.

Jan Wiezorek

Jan Wiezorek has taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at The London Magazine, Southern Pacific Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Bindweed Magazine, FIVE:2:ONE, Random Sample, Panoplyzine, Better Than Starbucks, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. He is author of Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011) and holds a master’s degree in English Composition/Writing from Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. Visit him at janwiezorek.weebly.com.