Susan Yount
stretch over wind-swirled hair.
You pose at river's edge
with a scarf longer than legs,
the length of the Sears Tower.
Eyes wet like the Calumet—
Sarah! Can you not see the geese
are leaving Chicago? Yet you stand
with a black scarf facing
winds from Lake Michigan.
Embroidery. Black sequins.
Sarah, can you not hear me?
I know growing-up wasn’t fun,
all the things we did to you.
How we ripped your best hand-me-down
dress. Our tongues mangled you
and those used tennis shoes.
But wasn’t it worth it— Sarah?
You, still standing at the mouth
of the Chicago River with snapdragon
lips as big as your heart gulping
the wind. You know it was worth it─
That black scarf lashing from your neck,
the skyline dressing your shoulders
and geese forsaking Chicago overhead.
But oh! The way that scarf rips
night's wind is deadly.
Susan Yount was born and raised on a 164-acre farm in Southern Indiana where she learned to drive a
tractor, harvest crops, feed the chickens and hug her beloved goat, Cinnamon. Soon after receiving her BA
from Indiana University in Photo-Journalism, she moved to Ohio and married a physicist. While attending Kent
State University as a guest graduate, she worked at the largest flour mill in northeast Ohio where she
kept those Accounts Receivables up-to-date (no small feat, that!). Not long ago at all, she moved to the
South Side of Chicago with a view of the Sears Tower from her front windows. She is the Editor of Arsenic
Lobster and works (for pay!) at the Associated Press on Wacker Drive. She will begin graduate studies
in poetry at Columbia College in Chicago this September. Only Mimi Mousy Tongue knows what Susan will be
doing next and she's not talking. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several print and online
magazines including Elixir, andwerve, can we have our ball back?, Verse Daily and The Chaffin Journal.
Susan is a 2003 recipient of The Lynda Hull Memorial Scholarship in Poetry.