This is a working-class bus
Busy: 7 am to 9 am,
3 pm to 6 pm,
and just after 9 pm, and always
until it stops running past 1 am,
from 31st and Pulaski, Kedzie/Homan,
Pink, Blue, and Brown,
Belmont and Kimball to Kedzie and Devon,
through neighborhoods
that look nothing like each other,
But all feel like home.
See the day laborers we pass
Waiting in denim, steel-toe uniform,
Stoic with my father’s profile.
It’s a bus of crooked teeth,
Of old ladies in raincoats with carts
full from the Korean market just off the expressway.
Of nannies clutching small hands of pre-school children,
teaching them their ways to say hello, goodbye, how are you
along the ride to keep them still.
Of Babcias making the sign of the cross after taking a seat.
A bus of school kids on lengthy routes to and from CPS,
to after school jobs,
Of house music pulsing from headphones,
or not and aloud.
Of mothers and fathers
with thread bare, faded, secondhand picks
shepherding children in shiny, new kicks
because we grew up poor, but my parents made sure we had
Everything.
It’s a bus of Local numbers on jackets, baseball caps,
Of night shifts and third shifts.
Of ‘I take no sick days’
No.
Of ‘I strike for sick days.’
It’s a bus of people, of power.
Alyssa Carabez is a poet with a day job. She has engaged in labor union, electoral, and environmental justice organizing in her beloved Chicago, IL. She has a micro-chapbook out with Ghost City Press, called Public Places I’ve Cried.