How could I be homesick for a place
I so badly wanted to escape?
How dare I miss the dirty sand,
Littered with broken plastic bottle caps,
mistaken for sea glass?
How could I miss a city that artists skip on tour
in favor of a capital that has less to offer?
How could I miss the town
That I ran from with tears in my eyes?
And now all I want is to speak of this place
Full of the people that I love and hate,
Cloaked in a humble blue-collaredness that I sing my praises for.
It is my home.
It is sunsets on Lake Erie in early June,
When the brambles behind my house thicken with blackberries.
It is sneaking out of my sliding screen door
to climb into the pickup truck passenger seat
of a butch woman that I want to kiss.
It is gay tinder running dry after a couple of swipes.
It is quiet neighborhoods full of the ghosts of tired Irish Catholics,
The bodies of O’Learys and Daileys and McDermotts
Buried beneath the canal that brought rich men their business.
It is a place that I often have to sell to my friends,
Or else they would never come visit.
But have you been there? Have you been queer here? Have you woken up at 5 am
To run to the glowing lake’s edge and feel it kiss your toes with calming coldness
and see a poor dead fish bobbing grotesquely at the same time?
Are you from a place where rivers catch fire?
Are you?
Ava O’Malley is a graduating senior double majoring in Journalism and Spanish. Ava worked as a tutor at the University Center for Writing-based Learning for three years. She is an associate editor at 14 East magazine, a contributing writer at the Gazette Chicago, and has work featured in several Chicago-based queer zines. In her free time, she writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and pulls tarot cards.