Ode to Not Scot’s

There stands a bar underneath the endless shaking

of the Montrose brown-line with a top-to-bottom

front window and dimmable green light bulbs,

with roars of drunken laughter and wood-waxed

bar tops. Here is where tethered bodies meet

to take laps around the sun, where beaten souls

come to get patched up by bartender-doctors

and their heavy rags that keep the place afloat,

and the candy-colored jukebox on the wall. This

place, which bears no true name but home, is

really not a place at all, but a brave joining

of commonalities, a collection of embodied

hearts that keep each other’s feet on the ground,

that keep the lights always burning.

 

______________________

Sydney is an Assyrian-American poet working towards her Poetry BA at Columbia College of Chicago. Her work has been published Sydney is an Assyrian-American poet working towards her Poetry BA at Columbia College of Chicago. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Poetry Review, The Lab Review, The Albion Review, Ransack Press, and more. She has worked on the editorial board for both the Columbia Poetry Review and Teenage Wasteland Review.