by Sophie Grimes
I am primarily a poet. When I compose a poem, rarely, I am always surprised at myself. It’s like spring for Chicagoans, or the way, early in his potty training, my toddler would look at his bowel movement with complete and utter wonder. There is an inevitability, a deeply natural and elemental aspect to wonder, and it comes from all kinds of places.
Also, it’s spring in Chicago.
Jorge Luis Borges said something about needing to leave Buenos Aires to truly see it. I’ve lived in many places, and I would say he’s right. Being away has seasoned my love for my hometown. I’ve lived in Kunming, China, where I taught English right after college. I’ve written about that place in so many of my poems and though I try, I will never reach anywhere near its essence. I suppose the point is to attempt, and that’s where the little wonders happen in the lines.
Here is one example of what it was like to live in China. Once, I left to visit a friend for a few days and when I came back, there was a giant pedestrian bridge traversing the street where I lived, and I couldn’t recognize the entrance to my apartment complex. It was very disorienting. I lived there during the Beijing Olympics. Whole vegetable markets would disappear, and a month later there would be an apartment building in its place. Sometimes I would walk around and listen to Philip Glass on my iPod and watch the flow of people and become a part of it.
That was a long time ago and I haven’t been back recently so there’s always a sense of loss when I think about that city: fading memories in parallel with its destruction, or development, depending on who you ask. But the city lives on without me in a completely different form.
When my friend visited us in Chicago, years later, she said they had built a new, elevated road to the new Kunming airport, which immediately collapsed. Officials said it was due to rainfall. She rolled her eyes. They rebuilt the bridge. It collapsed again, she said. Then she stopped talking and looked at me. Like so many of the Chinese people I met there, she has an uncanny ability to cut to the core of an issue without straight-up saying it. This issue being corruption.
I lived in Boston for a time. Boston is a city that disgorges everyone’s belongings onto the street every year in sync with the school year. Mattresses spray-painted with the words “bedbugs” and streets littered with broken beer bottles and so on. I got lost there constantly. Nothing was far away but everywhere was a convoluted journey. The directions scribbled on a piece of scrap paper from the directions I had googled on my laptop would dissolve into uselessness the moment I took a wrong turn on my bike. I couldn’t understand why it cost so much to live in such an inconvenient city. Perhaps this is one reason the people there are the way they are—always acting like they’ve been duped or are about to be. Up to that point, I had thought that all American cities shared certain fundamental characteristics. For example, if you are lost on your bike and you ask a stranger for directions, they will respond in a cordial fashion. This is not, in fact, true.
As a poet, irritation can be generative. When I realized I didn’t like Boston, I embraced all its features with a strange pleasure because it reinforced my decision to dislike it. Things like the bewildering difference between Boston and Cambridge when they are both so small and why they are separate entities when they are essentially the same thing. The obsession with Dunkin’ Donuts. The way bars would close at midnight. Coming from a city with bars that remained open until 4:00 a.m., I found this to be particularly repulsive. Liquor stores would close at midnight and people would have to scramble to get what they needed for the night. Did the city think we were children with no self-control? Looking back, I realize that we were. Kay Ryan, a poet I adore, said that she is like a clam that needs a little sand to get in there for a poem to start taking shape. Boston was my little bit of sand.
There was Brooklyn. Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. When I was in college, we drove from Ohio to New York for a cross-country meet. I was taking the subway somewhere and saw a woman holding a dented, worn-out Gucci paper bag. I was old enough to understand that she was poor, that she was carrying that bag to try to fool us. But I wasn’t old enough to realize that this was a quiet kind of heartbreak. I was just proud that I hadn’t been tricked. I remembered feeling clever, like I was wise to the performance, to the subtleties of the world. I was so immature and stupid to think I had any insights about poverty and hardship, things I had no understanding of.
Years later, when we moved to Brooklyn, we moved into the cheapest apartment we could find, on the 7th floor of a building with a semi-homeless guy who peed in the stairwell and got plates of food from our neighbors on the other side of the elevators. Once, water started gushing down the side of the elevator. I later found out that it was caused by a woman taking a shower on the roof with a bucket.
Once I watched a hawk swoop down into the weeds in front of our building and grab a gigantic rat, which the bird proceeded to tear apart on top of an AC unit in one of the hospital windows across the street. We lived on New York Avenue. The neighborhood was gentrifying at warp speed. A house by our subway stop put a sign in their window that said, “This House Is Not For Sale.” There were construction sites on all three sides of us. I was trying to get pregnant. I saw pregnant people everywhere. They were all so beautiful and I longed for what they had with my whole being. I remember riding on the subway with a friend of mine who had a new baby. We were headed to a book club made up of college friends and people in public education and she said to me, “You should never have a baby. Just don’t.” I hated her then for not intuiting how badly I yearned for what she had, how I worried I had waited too long, how I didn’t know what I would do if it didn’t happen. I hated her for giving me advice about motherhood, and thinking she knew what was best for me. But looking back, this is just another instance of me being a stupid girl on the subway. She was suffering from severe post-partum depression, and I couldn’t separate from my jealousy to care for her.
Being in New York required a much higher maintenance of inner energy. When there was a pretty sunset, I would see it in all the feeds. If something happened, it would be in all the newspapers, and everyone had to say something about it. Everything there was treated like national news. I was painfully aware of all my co-workers marrying and having babies. Others took exciting trips. There was just an endless hustle to it all. At a fancy dinner that my husband’s law school student group put together, the honoree spent half her speech talking about the subway routes she would take from her apartment in Park Slope to St. John’s University in Queens. With so much of life spent underground, it was very important to leave as often as possible if one was lucky enough to be able to do that. To get away from New York, I visited many other beautiful cities, which I loved deeply because they were not New York.
When we moved back to Chicago, it was winter, and I was married and pregnant and then spring came, and everything was new. We would take walks and marvel at the green spaces, the open spaces, something I hadn’t noticed before. The people with their sturdy Midwestern winter bodies. We drove to the Baha’i Temple and little blue flowers sprawled across the huge front lawns of the Winnetka homes. It was romantic. There is no other word for it. All our things from New York moved into our larger Chicago apartment and, like an accordion opening, spread out in the space, as though they were finally able to have a good stretch.
Before having a child, you can’t know how much time you have each day. After you have a child, it’s all taken away, and only then do you realize how lavish each day used to be.
Looking back at the time we spent in that apartment, in sweet anticipation of what was to come, with the white walls and dark wood trim, without jobs yet, with stained glass doors on the built-in bookshelves and packages that were not stolen from the front door, those were some of the best days. Perhaps I love this place because I’ve lived long enough for it to become a living, breathing palimpsest. The ghost ads on the buildings and all the places that aren’t around anymore exist in tandem with everything else.
Tower Records at Clark and Webster. Jeri’s Grill on Western and Montrose. Dinkel’s Bakery. Heartland Café in Rogers Park where my husband and I met a decade ago. Ending our shifts and going outside in the freezing cold to split a cigarette on the bleachers that were out front for a time. The Red Lion across from my husband’s old apartment on Rockwell that is now the Green Post. And then further back, as a kid, the White Hen Pantry. Bub City. Pier One Imports and Blockbuster on Broadway. I had started to make a list of all the no-longer places on a receipt but lost that, too, which feels apt. There are certain childhood friend’s houses that haven’t changed, even now, but they are few and far between and on the brink of being sold or changed due to death or downsizing or whatever levers push the big wheel of these cycles forward. The wheel connected to some bigger vehicle that is hard to see when you’re in the thick of the movement. Just hanging on, really.
The change eventually surpasses the unchanged. Now, I drive to an office in Oak Park twice a week and I listen to the college radio station until it gets fuzzy around Fullerton. There’s the lake, there’s the perfect tree I watch for along the bike trail. Sometimes I’ll keep the station on as it becomes indecipherable, and the static takes over completely right around the Oak Street curve. A full wash of it. Static like an auditory version of dirt; the eventual way of all things. Then I anticipate the trip through Lower Wacker. The food smells that will creep into the car from the hotels and restaurant’s exhaust fans down there, then the trip out on the highway and all the things I have to do that day.
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 11 · March 2025
Header image by Joisey Showa
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