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Native Lands

Benjamin Goluboff

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There’s a place where the north branch of the Chicago River
bends around a little island and turns hard south.


There’s condos on the west side and Forest Preserve to the east.
The woods in between, the riverbanks and the little island


are all blanketed with the Lesser Celandine whose flowers
bloom a loud false shade of crayon yellow.


On an old bridge pier someone has stenciled NATIVE LANDS.
Someone else is trying to chip away the stencil.

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Benjamin Goluboff is the author, most recently, of Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse, and Other Poems (Kelsay Books). Goluboff teaches at Lake Forest College and lives in Chicago. Some of his work can be read at https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff/

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