Exchange and Peoria

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.