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dancing girl press, 2015
$7.00
Annmarie O'Connell is a lifelong resident of the south side of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse Daily, Slipstream, SOFTBLOW, Vinyl Poetry, Curbside Splendor, Escape Into Life, 2River View and many other wonderful journals. Her first chapbook, Her Last Cup of Light, was published by Aldrich Press. Her first full length collection of poems, Your Immaculate Heart, will be published this year by Trio House Press. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Extract(s) .
The city isn’t a skyline
"Chicago ain't nothin' but a blues band." -Sunnyland Slim
That’s pretend. If you’re lucky, the city is your Mama chasing down the freight train rolling over your body. If not, it’s Loretta in the back- room piano West side soul Magic Sam calls it music to strip. Call it Gentlemen Jim’s and The Pit. Loretta really wants to get out of the animal city. She is a half price booty dilemma you can’t ignore. Weigh it into the performance, her thin alligator face doin’ it right now. The men tell her they summer in Cambridge and France with five hundred cameras, with saxophones and trumpets they don’t know how to use Loretta is an independent scholar with novel theories on Hot Jazz and Fist Wars. When she dies no one claims her. Her body sits in the county morgue then goes unmarked in a wooden box. Loretta is thousands of nameless bodies speaking one central heart beating deep down in the vicious city dirt.
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