from SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
Motto, Riverview Park, 1904-1967, Chicago
I.
Every city had one, a palace with a fried tint to its air, a hurting-hued screech of no underneath, everything plummeting or ascending, a monument to hazy flailing and sudden fun vomit. Swing the Riviera onto Belmont, and you see the Pair-O-Chutes rising to heaven on dual strings, headed for the pinpoint and release, then the sick whip and fall, the little public murder, a blaring grace so storybook gorgeous, suddenly flood in the throat.
Revelers board creaking Fireball cars and slice the August, mistaking acid bubbling in their bellies for symptoms of glee, then stop to stuff quavering guts with plastic and syrup. Their quick sustenance has wafted all day on a river of grease. They hunger for white cakes curled stiff with sugar, sausages that pop huge heat, pink candy of cotton chomping rot down their throats.
The jagged stains of compromised fruit circle screaming mouths and paint shadow across the teeth, making them horrible. Bulbs flash. Wet Polaroids are lifted and waved like church fans to etch and clarify in the summer steam.
The aged horses are dizzied, diseased. Chained to a tilting stake, they blur through the drag, deferring to their brutal, squirming burdens. Potbellied flies, nasty to the point of charm, nibble passages toward the horses’ blue hearts.
Above it all, the freak show MC—his shout an odd mixture of pity and sex—dares us to witness sweaty sloth, tiny floating corpses, so much skin unlike ours, more legs than allowed, and a Negro who can separate himself from his eyes.
While on the midway, your father will never win the thinly stuffed neon grinners—the bears, dolphins, curlique serpents, kewpie dolls and counterfeit Mickey Mice that leer from shelves. He hurls balls at weighted milk cans, blasts at a measured parade of bobbing ducks, guns water into a pinpoint, guesses a woman’s weight. Finally, he just buys something soft and ugly, a token you will clutch and sing to until, too blackly loved, it melts.
At dusk, he steers you away from the midways squalling edge, where everything seems to be happening, where the hooting and laughter have a raw, unmeasured throat. You pout, he pulls, and, not for the first tune, you wonder what he hides.
II.
I am their pickaninny, dressed in a repeating river.
All of me is droop and sustain.
My drenched dungarees are gravity on me.
I have learned to smile at the several versions of my name, my face is complete in its teeth and studied dumb ogle. Oh, woe is me I say while the white boys wind up, and damn if they don’t always smack that huge disc, dead center.
I rise laughing from my clockwork baptisms, the canned river funked with my own spit and piss, just to see another man clutching the red ball, his eyes harder than the first of these. Sometimes an awed Negro dots the crowd, his numbed smile a link chained to mine. I spot one using his body to block his little girl’s view of me, so I make my voice louder: I oh sweet jesus kind suh no.
I lawd ham mercy suh 11 believes I might drown I please let me dry off in this sun a little I mercy me you sho does look strong suh until she twists hard away from her daddy and full unto me.
I have just enough time for her to sound it out:
D-D-D-unk-unk Dunk a N-N-N-ig-ig-Nig-ger and then I salute, and hold her father’s eyes as I fall.
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Nominated by Sugar House Review