City Blues Chicago

This project was my attempt to capture the intimate connection between alcohol consumption and folk music that lingers in a lot of the songs we sang. I focused, specifically, on "Rollin' and Tumblin'." There was a rawness to the song that made it one of my favorites of the semester. The song stuck out to me for it's incorporation of electric guitar, its wailing bends, and Muddy Waters' almost lazy voice--evocative, but with so little enunciation. My heavy reliance on "s" sound alliteration was meant to capture the way the lyrics in the song blur together.

            It does not start off slow. Of course you know this.

I take a sip of an IPA and I’ve necked it. I crack open another and we’re searching for a glass receptacle but you don’t find one so I stick the bottle on your desk and say it could be a vase. There’re two vases on your desk, two flowers per, and then there’re three, and then there’re four, and each flower tips against the rim. I look for my leftover handle, but then it’s empty, and meanwhile so too are the shots. My vision starts to droop and you shimmer into a smile and I’m laughing, but I can’t remember about what before you stop to water the flowers and they bob and my throat is sore but the chuckles keep churning, drawing forth hiccups and a stale burp. I’m on my knees, siphoning the last drops though the lid. “So am I slurping, so am I lisping” sibilantly slips from my pharynx, sludges through soft palate, simmers incomprehensibly as it settles into the fissure between us—sketched like a scientific diagram of dissymetric lips inches from a kiss, still and steady, still steady—and all sayings are immediately lost to your ears, shortly later to my memory.

“Stop.” “Cease.” You set the vases in a row. “My house is not a barrelhouse.” You grab your keys. “Don’t leave, drinking solo is narcissist” I call after the door is closed, and I look for a stoge. Sleep lurks like an eastward shadow at 1 pm. Alkaseltzer sleep comes. Sweet dreams! You got to your mom’s safe, thanks for asking. That’s what you tell me when you wake me. You’re hitting me with your needlepoint pillow. Your mom lives across town. The 10 to the 79, a left at the stop, southside of the street. The room is sepia through half-closed eyes. You hit me again. “Leave.” I struggle to get on my shoes. “Leave now.” I leave.

I text you. “I’m sorry. [Exclamation point].” It’s a lazy exclamation mark, I’m trying to imbue, to inflect. You leave a read receipt. It does not suffice. “So what” I tell myself. This has happened before, It can happen again. I’ve been superimposed on the cliché: I call. You don’t pick up. Then it happens again, in part. A twelve-rack. A call. A shot. An answer.

            It’s all sliding by and I’m grasping at moments—leaning against a pole supporting an above-ground rail, shadows splitting my face and you looming beyond with a smile; hands screwed together on a pew and floppy sunhats; skinny dips and baptisms; all left behind—and I’m blurring, bloated belly, belches brewing, promises of another city but I’ll stay, I’ll leave for Memphis, I’ll come back and stay, but only after I sleep and try to dream of you. You come and go cyclically, but maybe we’re now spiraling out, and rivers of whiskey suspend my solipsism and I’m trying to get asleep, rollin and tumbling, spinning hums and songs in the mattress springs, but no one’s there to hear, and I know that if you were, you’d fake a snore, you would not listen.