- Lois Lane in Bronze
Illinois, your windmills can suckgolf balls through straws, your
tornados turn the world the colorof easy condiments. Let’s mustard
and relish ourselves, pick the poppyseeds from our navels with tooth
and nail—which is to say: tongue,which is to say: language. Illinois,
you’ve always lionizedthe proper heroes: women in
bronze over men of steel. Here,even an Ohio River town of 6,000
can be called Metropolis.
Let’s pretend my uncle found the girlface-down in Boneyard Creek. Let’s
say she was a squeeze to a superhero.Let’s pretend the wind carried her
there—flying like a balloon, Lindbergh’sgrasshopper fetish, Santos Dumont,
the college boys tossing in groupie-domtheir underpants into her hands,
fingers glowing with coals. Let’s pretendUncle Paul wasn’t late to his third
wedding for gigging frogs in Peoria,the beasts deflating beneath [End Page 144]
his spear, the air dribbling overthe wings of the horseflies still
caught like hair in the backsof their throats. Let’s remember
how the sky flashed as we kissedourselves muddy, cooked the legs
in lemon and butter, stunned the pooranimals with bright light, so unexpected
in so much downstate dark. Let’sremember that home is where
the Nazi Buzz Bomb can spilta Steak ‘n’ Shake extra thick
with Sonny Bono’sBobcat Vest. This is my old
house. This is unincorporatedNormal. Let’s remember how
we once loved each other so muchin this state, our clothes flew
from our bodies, even withoutthe tornado. In our pockets, always
extra batteries. For longer life.For flashlights that illuminate
as they blind. [End Page 145]
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Pot Farm and Barolo (both from the University of Nebraska Press), and Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It (forthcoming from W. W. Norton: Liveright in 2014); the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop; and the chap-books Four Hours to Mpumalanga and Aardvark. Recent work appears in The New Republic, Field, Epoch, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, and others. He was born and raised in Illinois, and currently teaches Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North.