Entrapment and Other Writings Read Online Free

his novel of the same name. Various Algren works have poems sprinkled throughout, including
Who Lost an American?, Notes from a Sea Diary
, and
The Last Carousel
. And, of course,
Chicago: City on the Make
, a book-length prose poem, is one of Algren’s most enduring works. The five poems collected hereare drawn from the late 1930s and early ’40s, when Algren was not yet an internationally renowned novelist and may have thought of himself as equally a poet. With the exception of “Local South,” an occasionally rhymed and loosely metered poem that appeared in
Poetry
in 1941, the selections are free verse. Whether sketching an urban scene or narrating the story of a life swirling like dirty water down some bathtub drain, Algren’s poems, though blown by his own inner weather, invariably concern the lives of others. They possess the virtues of directness, economy, careful but unpretentious diction, and point. In his essay “Do It the Hard Way” (included in this collection), Algren writes that “the best and the truest” sort of poetry is that “of the ball-park and the dance hall, of the drugstore at noon, of the pool room and the corner newsstand, of the Montgomery-Ward salesgirls reminiscing on the nearest streetcar or bus.” Certainly, one can hear in these poems just such language, spoken by just such people. The lyricism that underlies every prose word of every Algren novel originates with poems like these.
NOTE
    1. The first story Algren published, “So Help Me,” appeared in
Story
magazine in 1933 and was then included in his classic 1947 short collection,
The Neon Wilderness
.

FORGIVE THEM, LORD
    Christopher Morgan, a gaunt Negro farmer, was returning from his regular Saturday night visit to a prostitute named Queenie Lee. The sweet dark warmth of the Alabama night pressed him close about. Its closeness was a womanly closeness—all faintly perfumed breathing, deep dark calm, and eyes of velvet mist. With an inward smirk of thick self-satisfaction Christopher mused on Queenie. “She sho’ was one sweet gal to me tonight,” he reflected. Vaguely he wondered whether any of the white miners of the neighborhood patronized her.
    The turmoil she had aroused in his blood had scarcely subsided, but a gentle fatigue had already set in. He walked slower and slower. His body felt ripe and rich, heavy and solid, as though the blood had turned to warmish milk. “Ah’ll sleep right deep tonight,” he said to himself. Then he stopped, dropped to his knees, crept into the long flat shadows that bordered the roadside. Three horses, two black and one a sleek dappled brown, were tied to a dead elm not twenty paces to his left; and he knew as by instinct what business brought them there. He lay very still; he uttered no sound; he listened intently; and up from the woody declevity embanking the road came a murmur of low voices, tense, and somehow cold. Christopher Morgan crept closer.
    There were three of them, but none were robed, and Christopher knew all three. They were miners: Bryan Jenks and his two tall sons, Luther and Lloyd. Between Luther and Lloyd stood a Negro, fat and aged, gray of hair and light of flesh, who Christopher had neverbefore seen. Half clinging to this fellow was a mulatto girl of about fifteen whose throat, Christopher remarked, was magnificently long and soft. She was pregnant.
    Suddenly his head became a lump of blue-green ice. Was it possible? Damn it, they couldn’t hang a child. Or could they? Could they kill a helpless old man also? Well, by God, they wouldn’t—not while he had red blood in his belly. He sucked in breath fiercely, between fierce jaws. The muscles behind his shoulders began to bunch and play until his entire back was quivering and his great thighs were tensed and eager. His heart set up a strong marching rhythm, then a bold laughing beat in his breast, singing ever faster and bolder. Yes, by Christ, he’d give the sneaking brutes what-for. Anxiously he darted his eyes