Cityscape After Our Old Cat’s Death and a Summer Shower,

by Susanna Lang

Ronan Park, Chicago

All the traditional June flowers—once-blooming roses
like red velvet blankets thrown over fences, purple
clematis, orange daylilies that only last the day—all
more vivid after the rain; sharper smell of garden dirt
and honeysuckle and urine as I walk through puddles
shimmery with oil outside the construction fence.
From my sitting stone beside the Chicago River, I watch
a cormorant emerge from a dive with a silver fish held up
like a trophy as two black-crowned night herons wait,
heads down, for fish to respond to their desire. If I believed
in such things, I’d think the river god knew that I needed
to see what still lives and brought everything she had
to this bend in the river, including me, including the paletero
who comes ringing his bell over the bridge at Lawrence Avenue.

~~~

Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translation of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). Her poems and translations have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Asymptote, The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Circumference, december magazine, and The Slowdown, among other publications.