The Sunday Poet: David Tisel

David Tisel

David Tisel grew up as an American expatriate in the Netherlands and Germany before moving to the U.S. at age 15. His poems often evoke a sense of place and in-between-ness, or nostalgia for the present moment. David is currently a graduate student in urban planning at MIT, and he lives in a cooperative house in Davis Square. 

White Chicago

Chicago, with grit in your teeth

concrete feet and steel bones

smokestacks for arms and

slaughterhouse stomachs:

your buses go straight down

rows of orange in the night

sprawling huge into the plains:

a circuitboard city

or, a sausage city—

union shops and machine

politicians—gross, delicious,

Polish.

Chicago, where people believe

they are white, but Slavic

vestiges remain, or German:

a polka parlor, potića,

Grandma's accent at the table—

spots of color refusing

to be erased

but to create white—

race riots and uneasy alliances—

there must be black

and so the south side stretches bleak

worn from attrition and siege and

the Chicago Police, finally:

the fullest expression of the violence

of an idea--whiteness--that birthed

Chicago and kills Chicago nightly

but still Chicago will hum

and scream, gears turning,

furnace blazing, shaping

the myth that built America.