we have to leave our mark on history somehow

while we can. 

my brother bought spray paint last time he was here two summers ago. 

i was just getting to know him for the first time

this hebrew apollo / middle-aged teenage rebel of mine. 

we drove to oak park to buy the paint 

and to the old house hemingway once lived in.       

as empty as they come.       

the painting thing never worked out so he left 

the paint in the attic with some weed he was too alone to smoke. 

walking along the lakefront, we found a language we both could speak

of women and drugs and slow sticky summers. 

the cans have emptied since; 

traded for stolen wine or victims of my train-stalking journeys, 

now just alleyway footprints,

now just some lines from some poems written a second ago, 

now just eternity. 

now, i carry in my pocket paint pens i use to become timeless

this public bathroom sage / train station sign desecrator i have become. 

the next morning i see my words rubbed off by some stranger’s hands, 

carried away by some cloth and 

split apart by some three a.m. laundromat. 

there isn’t time to miss them; 

there isn’t time.

only minutes when i’m not seen, 

enough to scribble some teenage wisdom on some other concrete canvas.

Eva is a high school senior, an INFP, a Slytherin, and, among other things, a poet. Growing up in Russia in a family of political dissidents, she struggled with her parents' and peers' expectations. Now, a refugee in Chicago, she has learned to let go (a little bit) and notice the beauty in the world. And write about it. She is passionate about the Beatnik movement, the 1920s, electoral politics, contemporary art, and people-watching. She also occasionally exists on instagram at @evagelmann.