Katherine Kelaidis
American Carnage
On the Red Line late Sunday night, the empanadas
still warm in the brown paper bag. I take one of the dozen
empty seats and stomp my feet lightly against the cold.
It’s dangerous here I am told, but I know I haven’t
felt safer—Not since before the day at 14
when two boys about my age walked into the high school
on the other side of the highway and made it a byword.
Or when I sat in my London flat, a grown-up now
as the BBC broadcast pictures of the theater
where a boy kissed me for the first time
because of a man with a gun. No, I am not afraid
of the Red Line or North Lawndale or even the South Side—
Suburban high schools with big green lawns fill my nightmares;
central-lot-ready backdrops set on park lands;
movie theaters in the parking lots of shopping malls
too big for city blocks: They are my “no go zones”—
American carnage brought to you by boys
who could have filled an Abercrombie ad
if not for the trench coat or the Joker laugh
or the mother dead from pneumonia.
It’s cold here and too flat.
Far from where the columbines grow.
So I take an empanada still warm from the bag.
I take a bite. I’m on the Red Line and it’s Sunday night.
Katherine Kelaidis is a writer and historian whose work focuses on early Medieval Christianity and contemporary Orthodox identity in non-traditionally Orthodox countries. Her essays have appeared in Public Orthodoxy, Religion Dispatches, Offbeat Home & Life, and other journals. She is a visiting assistant professor at DePaul University and a resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago. Kelaidis hold a PhD in classics from the University of London.
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