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I just found this poem among some of my sister's papers.   Usually I can read one of her poems and know the circumstances in which she wrote.  However, this one is a mystery to me.  My best guess is that she read the Stephen King novel, The Stand (one of our favorites) and then pictured her beloved Chicago under those conditions.  We used to talk about events like that and her imagination was vivid - as vivid as when we were two small girls in St. James's Park.

the town changed after the

flu.  the birth and death of stores came, and i, like a

soldier in the trench, giddy from gas

and bloated from weakness, saw

my buddies had died and had been

replaced by a fresh faced foreigner from

Pittsburgh.

i marveled at the new brick

that had housed smelly

pines at Christmas, near the Chinese restaurant around the

corner.  the one i’d never been to.  by

the time the plague left the bad deli

by the great lake that Harold Washington had liked

had been abandoned

and on the street of Thais

was a card shop which had

harlequin dolls.  i collect dolls—death reposed in

porcelain and plastic;

coming alive only at night like the new town after

the flu.  i like

death, but the red and blue pizza shop that is now

on the boulevard is

too much.