By Craig Johnson [Bio]
Craig Johnson is a Chicago transplant originally from a small town around St. Louis, but fell in love with the city after moving into Hyde Park to attend the University of Chicago. After graduating he moved to Pilsen where he lives in a three bedroom apartment with five people, and spends his time making rent, building Android apps, writing , and applying to history PhD programs. He has one party trick: if you show him a world map, he can tell you what year it was printed in. He goes to really, really wild parties.
It was 1AM and they had just made love on the brown futon in the living room. It was late but still loud from the trucks rumbling up Ashland Ave. and the fan they’d pointed at themselves. When they were done they slowed down and their minds came back to them they lay together, holding each other, feeling the sweat that made the sheets cling to their backs, staring at each other’s face in the streetlight that made its way through the blinds.
“I love you,” she said, smiling.
“I love you too,” he said. He smiled too, and looked down to the condom still on him. “I’m gonna go take this off,” he said, and kissed her.
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By Joel Mendez [Bio]
Joel Mendez was born in the Borderlands of South Texas and came of age in the harsh reality of Pilsen’s mean but nonetheless enlightening streets. He has been writing poetry since his days as a student at Holy Trinity Grammar School. During this time it his best kept secret (it wasn’t cool to write poetry in his circle of friends). Joel has worked as a science and math teacher in middle and high school in Schaumburg and Waukegan schools for the past 19 years. He writes as a conduit for documenting many of his life experiences and sharing his love and appreciation of Mother Nature’s infinite wonders; his ultimate goal is to write his life story in a patch-quilt chapbook of poems that people can enjoy reading. A sampling of his poetry can be found in his blog: El Ombligo de Aztlan.
You were there playing
Hockey in its streets
Countless winter days
Thinking like a Blackhawk
And swinging your crude
Stick hard–like a pro
In the steely gray
Ice-covered asphalt.
You were there when spring
Arrived dressed in green
With a florid face
And you happily
Readied–mentally
For a fresh game
Of Chicago-style
Softball at Dvorak
Park and held your breath
Expecting your friends
(And a certain girl
You fell for) to show.
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By Shontay Luna [Bio]
Shontay Luna is an former student of Columbia College’s Poetry Workshop I & II and a graduate of the BA program at Robert Morris University. Her poetry has appeared in Parnussus, Anthology, ChicagoPoetry.com, and The Stray Branch. In 2010, she was a semi-finalist for the GBOMA (Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award). Sample works can be seen at shontayluna.blogspot.com.
The all-night taco stand simmers in the
midnight heat. The unsaid social group meets again
for yet another round of comradeship and slurred
serenades to themselves. Before stepping out the
door to the Street of Oblivion, they order one
more taco de sesos for the road, in a last-ditch
attempt to access higher levels of intelligence.
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By Sarah Gonzalez [Bio]
Sarah Gonzalez is a Xicana/Xingona poet, storyteller, and youth educator committed to anti-oppressive and anti-racist work through use of narrative story telling and direct action. She is also a peace keeper who is passionate about working with gang-affiliated youth to provide them resources and healing through transformative and restorative justice practices. She will be graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2014 as a licensed K-9 Educator.
I found you in a bar
that feels like Mexico in the early 90s
the bar where everyone’s dad
used to get fucked up,
my friend Genesis would say.
It’s a space idle and frozen in time,
stuck between the U.S. border and gentrification,
the kind of bar I imagine my father’s father sitting in
drunk on communism and tequila.
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