Tina Boyer Brown

Doxology

I am real. The speaking living source power.
My face locked, soul loaded. Constitution
gripping, music making, spell singing
license taking, teeth baring,
lip reading, dynamic hostility’s rebuke.
Only my knuckles are white.

You suspect we control the currents.
You know we are the future.

Keep voting. You cannot usurp our joy.

---

Whence the Lake Cools

We watched steel cool like islands. Break
and breeze. A watch, a pension, time dimmed lights,
closed Broadway.
 
Air flowed through rains when steel ran real and spit
out cash. Steel saved; we saved; steel tried. No one
looked when Grandma lived across from that police.
He locked his door, took off his gun, turned on
the tube and slept. We set alarms midday.
 
You see the risk of open doors unlocked
when you’re inside afraid of empty streets.
 
James Brown lit the marquee. Chuck Berry
lit the marquee. Five Jacksons grew up right
here. A talent show, a murmur, a shout,
our claim.
 
Long past the steel mills’ fulsome life the air
smells like the steel still forms, and trucks—so few--
go forth on streets where lights held flame. A riot
of dance and song.




--
Tina Boyer Brown is the Creative Writing Department Head and a founding teacher at The Chicago High School for the Arts. She is a lead teacher for the Summer Poetry Institute for Educators in Chicago sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Her work also appears in The Journal of Education, RHINO Poetry, and POETRY Magazine.