wildscape. literary journal

Chicago Common Brick
by Grant Ellsworth

WINTER
last month, i got a new therapist. emily. we meet weekly, in 
a dinky brick building with creaky wood floors. she’s been 
telling me to sit and feel stuff more. i am trying.

february 13th. you and i broke up on the phone today, 
because long distance is a slog. the connection was all 
spotty and we kept stumbling. stopping. starting. you 
bought me a tiny lego train set for valentine’s day, and you 
wanted me to agree it would’ve been a perfect gift. i 
agreed, no doubt. luckily, you kept the receipt. we  hung 
up, and i sat by the radiator. it went ding-thunk, churning 
thick steam. 

tonight, i can’t stop thinking about the week you visited 
chicago. i said i didn’t like mark rothko, so you made me 
confront him in the art institute. you said, “you can’t 
understand him without seeing his work face-to-face.” i 
didn’t get it. we went home and i made cacio e pepe. 

SPRING
my apartment’s got one wall of flakey,
old-as-hell chicago common brick. it’s 
seen better days – specks dribble off it
constantly, always spilling residue on
wood floor, these cement cracks so wide 
i could stuff my whole pinky inside. still, 
the wall earns me loads of compliments. 
             exposed brick is an enviable feature. 

i got drinks with a friend who said
chicago’s common brick gets fished
from the city’s river-guts, dredged
out of the bed’s wet soil, flush-full 
of lime, iron & silty particulate grit

which gives the brick a distinct orangeish-
khaki color, like stained newspapers draping 
rusty gutters. the bricks are sturdy & cheap,
he says, but look downright, no-good ugly.
	     he speaks with pity, like the bricks are his dying pet fish. 

architects use out-of-state brick on flashy 
building facades, tucking chicago stuff to
back, side, and internal walls. milwaukee 
brick looks tan like buttercream, st. louis’s 

looks red like raw steak; but chicago’s flesh
looks like piss-poorly aged cheese. my friend
points out the embarrassing bricks all over 
town on a late night stroll. we talked for miles
             over sounds of jittery breeze rushing through oak leaves.

SUMMER 
today’s my last day with emily.
she told me weeks ago she’d be 
moving (new job, out-of-state). 
it’s a sunday. it’s a hangover. 

I stagger out of bed at eight a.m.,
wet my hair, flop in the alley.
I board a train, interior buzzy 
with anxious pre-pride party 

fervor––june thirtieth. last day 
of pride; a neighborhood full of it. 
three boys wear sheer crop-tops, 
shivery, it’s early, sixty degrees. 

two stocky old guys don gaudy
kaleidoscopic button-ups––my 
olive shirt and shorts feel oh-so-
drab in contrast. 

i enter the therapy 
room, plop in the big chair. 
all these big, cold abstract paintings 
dangle on walls, cheap knockoffs. modernist
rothko bullshit, they remind me 
of the museum with you, 
and interrogating his big 
grand stupid full-of-air 		
silly 	      walls of color.

i told emily i went on a walk this 
week––took the L to lincoln square,
found the nature preserve in winne-
mac park, for the first time. haven’t 
heard bugs or seen honest shrubs like 
that since i moved to the city. i love it here,
but all the surfaces are hard & imporous, 
and now i never really tune my ears to
bug-buzzing below      	   red line tracks
in the little brick room     	   i’m living in. 

today i’m crumbling and
sort of 	   breaking down entirely.
emily’s     	    moving away right 
as we 	    		      found a real pace.
she sees 	       a fervor building in
my 			              tapping legs, she 
tells 			        me to breathe and 
listen     		                 to my body. 
i stop. 			       i start to cry, why am i crying	
then i talk 		      more. i don’t know why i’m crying,          
i need to talk 	  until i find it and		
then she says: 
             you can’t 	 
             psychoanalyze tears
             while they’re falling.

i stare at faux-rothkos on peeling walls 
until my vision clears. they reveal nothing, 
no matter how close I look. 
i curse the monochrome, 
ever-unanswered knocks. 

the session ends. i say thanks. it was 
an honor and a pleasure. the air’s sticky 
on my cheeks when i step outside. 
i smoke a cigarette on craggly brick, 
both of us hiding out in the alley. 
ten a.m.––already starting to feel hot. 

AUTUMN
Today, I’ve lived in Chicago for one year. 
my friend and I puff lucky strikes in quick 
succession, flicking nubby stumps into half
of a bang! energy can on the wooden patio. 

Wind nips my ears. should’ve worn a flannel. 
the trees are drying up now, burnt-brown leaves 
cosplaying chameleons on coarse alley-brick, 
I feel this strange, quiet, bustling energy like 
            the whole town’s packing up its colors. 

We don’t say much, us two addicts who said
we were gonna quit last week. we savor the
dumb smokes. my friend’s surprised it’s only 
been a year since I moved to town. I’m surprised 
              I haven’t made a trek out to the aquarium yet. 

Last week, my friend and I took some gummies at the art institute. 
there’s a rothko out right now––an old one, called number 19. 
it’s got a cluster of gray rectangles up top, and a yellow 
square in the bottom right, with an orange backdrop.
I observe for a minute––
I see a gray man looking in a yellow mirror.
or maybe a yellow man looking in a gray mirror. 
or maybe a dull gray man staring back at me, hell maybe 
I’m the mirror. maybe I’m the orange! maybe I’m just stoned. 
I stare at it for longer than 
anything else that day 
and walk away annoyed––

wait, oh god. is that the point? 
epiphany. then:
man, I hope that’s not the point. 
I think I’m just stoned. 

WINTER: AGAIN
february 15th. two a.m. now, by a field in logan square. i 
am drunk, but not spinny-helpless drunk like my friends, 
who i just nudged into the back of an uber because one of 
them threw up in a club called ‘slippery slope’ and got us 
all kicked out. eyes glazed, i’m leaned up on spattery city 
brick, it’s twenty degrees out but i’m cozy under orange 
lamplight.

i hold a cigarette. got it from a pretty girl in the club. i’m 
nicotine free, twenty days. my head pounds. something’s 
welling up and i wonder if i’m gonna hurl but all the 
sudden it’s in my throat, i’m gonna cry for who knows 
why––it’s the withdrawals, i think, or the drinks, or the two 
am, or maybe still the emily, or the constant lack of you, or 
the lack of any You, or it’s city life, or probably the long 
dumb chicago cold, or it’s my brother leaving for two years 
to serve a mormon mission in peru when i was a kid, when 
i walked into his room the day he left, too young to get it, 
when i saw his converse dangling off the side of his bed, 
and i swear to god i felt his living ghost in there––

man, i want this cigarette. i squeeze my fists, let the 
fingernails munch my frigid pale palm. 

it comes out. spilling, deluge, like the moment moses 
stopped parting the red sea and it all came torrentially 
crashing in on itself. i cry big and i feel it––i walk into that 
big room, the place we go when we cry, the one where you 
see every cry you’ve ever had, all the ghosts and haunts of 
every shit moment. it’s always so much bigger than i think, 
and in a way, it’s a sweet room to enter, even if i never 
want to be there, just like how it’s nice to see old friends 
even when you don’t get along that well anymore, just to 
know they’ve still got a pulse––

and then i let out a wail, audible, and get so self-aware about 
it that the door SLAMS! shut and now i’m

recomposed. RECOMPOSED. i stand straight, put on my 
beanie. i walk to the river, unclench fists, crescent marks in 
my palm like little baby moons. i throw the cigarette on the 
ground. i am sorry for littering but i feel like the universe 
gets it. i put my hands on the
cold river bridge rails
and i watch the 
blip blip blip of
the tip of the 
Sears tower. 

i tap my fingers to its pulse. 

it’s as pretty as the day i got here.
it’s such a lovely city, not quite
mine, but almost there.
i let myself feel it. 

about the author // Grant Ellsworth