Midwestern Cities
by Dave Lucas 

You Midwestern cities, you threadbare capitals,
lost satellites, will your outskirts never end?
Will your suburbs run each other through
and your accents bleed into a slang of silk and husk?
Dawn is slipping across the chain-smoking factories of Pittsburgh and Cleveland, where the third shift
sleeps off its Yuengling, where pierogi boil and stanch.
Wake, Detroit, the morning molts over 10 Mile.
Rise, parched Indianapolis; rise, great skyscraping
Chicago, the odors of your millions soap the El.
Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,
your waters run on.  Your congregations hymn,
the billboards declare The Second Coming
could come at any second.  From anywhere,
Akron or Grand Rapids.  From Gary, Kenosha, Duluth.

Dave Lucas is the author of Weather (Georgia, 2011), a book of poems.  A PhD candidate in English at the University of Michigan, he was recently featured on BillMoyers.com as one of Rita Dove’s “young poets to watch.”  He lives in Cleveland, where he was born and raised.