by Ralph La Rosa
After and with Carl Sandburg
“Each day, it seems like the president is deciding maybe he read something in the newspaper and he’ll send troops to Portland or perhaps to New Orleans or perhaps to Chicago, so I’m always glad to know he’s not sending them to Chicago. We don’t need them. There’s not an emergency in Chicago,” [Illinois Gov. JB] Pritzker said. —WGN-TV, September 11,2025
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a man in the Chicago area who drove his car into ICE officers, a representative for the agency said on Friday, adding that the man had been resisting arrest during a vehicle stop. The man, who the authorities said was not legally in the country, dragged the officer as he fled in his vehicle, the agency representative said. The officer was severely injured and was in stable condition. —The New York Times, September 12, 2025
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
Euphoric, I recall Chicago and my strenuous birth in Mercy hospital eighty-seven years ago,
as shaggy as an ape, they said, big shouldered like our city, and soon to be mentored
by its churning and creating twin energies of increasing good and encroaching evil—
but never like the present and deadly evil of the lurking and hulking Super Swine.
He intends to break your will with his weaponized and endlessly destructive lies.
Carl, like you, I have seen the gunmen kill and then set free to kill
again, when he, the Swine, forgave his armed and loyal mob
of treasonous thugs he ordered to overthrow democracy.
But I know Chicago is brutal: brutal enough to resist his folly, expose
that he’s no better than another hog to butcher for the world.
As you chanted, Carl: Show me another city with lifted head singing so proud
to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
It needs to be; for if the Swine slogs through our city, destroying lives and laws,
unmet by brutal resistance, he will make moves to widen his war throughout our land.
Ralph La Rosa has published prose on major American writers, including Emerson and Thoreau, and has placed short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film scripts. These days, he mostly writes poetry, appearing on the Internet, in print journals and anthologies. His books include the chapbook Sonnet Stanzas and full-length Ghost Trees and My Miscellaneous Muse. And he loves The New Verse News!
