By Susan Hogan [Bio]
Chicagoan by day, Californian by night, Susan Hogan is a poet who embraces the life of a nomad. She collects energy and immediacy wherever she is, spreading it outwards through her writing. She has served as contributing editor of Poetry International, has worked helping underprivileged students in San Diego with English as a second language, has interned for the Poetry Foundation’s think tank, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, and is currently employed at a small arts book publisher. Susan has given poetry readings across the country and is constantly generating new work, with help in part from her co-collaborators at the Chicago-based Caffeine Arts Collective, where she is resident poet. Her writing has appeared inCurbside Splendor, Chicago Quarterly Review, Serving House Journal, and other publications. Susan and her partner Ben just welcomed their first child, Vera, to this world on April Fool’s Day, 2014. Keep up with her at www.susan-hogan.com and twitter.com/writemorepoems.
How did the Back of the Yards lose its wonder?
There’s a bull’s head on a post.
I feel his ghost haunting me.
I feel haunted by the ghost
of every animal I’ve ever paid somebody off
to kill; the slaughterhouses are industrialized
assassinations. History backwards: Chicago’s skyscrapers
tumble into piles of bone.
The way a hog screams is like a child
being murdered— You cannot unhear this sound.
Your memory is a feast of canned atrocities.
In this city, I turned the wheel
To lift the slit-throat hogs by their haunches.
At the same time, it was my death cry. What am I?
Lose me now in some other place, let the ghosts
paw the ground with big eyes asking.
