Oak Park Poem by MARINA GIPPS

Oh, the way the car moves,
how she is—

mother in a stationwagon,
70's funk junkie
of art and jackson pollack
torture of red museum prints
on walls, the wailing
of babies backseat bumping;
muse of the punishment,
the destruction
never chainsmoking—

when father's pipe is lit
in front of a book too tired to read
into babies, all eight of us,
and hospitals giving birth to defects.

This is where i'm from-
trains high off the ground,
rumbling all life.

And when i went back
to barbara's bookstore
on that street across the blue diner
with the blue waitresses in the white light-
i saw it again.