Kirsti Sandy
- portlandbove
- Oct 31, 2022
- 3 min read
Governor’s Island Bridge
It’s like one of those bridges in songs, he said
But I thought he meant
Over troubled waters, or the kind of bridge that means friendship, or healing
Bridges build, or they mend, or connect.
A metaphor
My only way home
A quick arch and a bump at the top
Euphoric
Pick up enough speed and it would lift you
On one side the sunset, the other the raccoon I tried to miss
Its corpse still festering in the heat
Boats crossing under us
Waves hitting rocks, motors puttering, no wake
As we accelerated
Airborne, our insides alight
With something like closure, or resolution
And then I thought
It was the other kind of song he meant
Where a boy speeds up in his racecar
Crashes, dies, and leaves the girl behind
Teen angel, can you hear me?
It is so hard to say what we mean
And to hear what is said
The structure is sound
Is what he meant
It is not about us in particular
That feeling, that night, that bridge
Loons in the distance, their mournful cries rising
The concrete, the steel, the acceleration
The buzz of motorboats
The crash of water against stone
The car tires hitting the pavement
On the way down, all the way down
I thought I would burst open but
The structure is sound, is what he meant
A Love Letter to Julian Rosenblum, Creator of the Yale Course Name Generator
You are shopping a really cool class this semester
You can’t wait to tell me about
You offer me options
Endless permutations
You are the boy I never met in college
Who does the reading
Who understands the assignment
Who is endlessly amused by academia but still believes that words matter
Who can tell Kant’s merchant joke and get the punch line right: their wigs turned grey
While I was writing papers for money for hairy-knuckled date rapists
You were dreaming up syllabi for courses you would someday teach
Wenches and Community in Behavioral Neuroscience
Imagining threesomes with authors whose books
You never sold back to the bookstore for money for beer and pot
Or microwaveable pizza rolls
I will see you in Words, Literature, and Valuation
In the front row you will look back and smile
Then look away
In Zombies, Anglo-Saxons, and Management in Europe I will give you my number
You never call
After Deviance and Photography in American Education I wait by the door
You leave by another
At a party I will see you and ask if you are the TA in Evangelism and Hip-Hop in the Portuguese Diaspora
No, for Gravity and Orientalism in the Real World, you answer
When I buy the books for Conflicts, Pathogens, and Portraiture in the Digital Humanities
You are in line, three ahead, with a textbook four inches thick
Cover smooth and blank
I imagine you, arriving home
Opening the cover over and over, and each time
A new title appears
One of countless combinations
You can’t wait to tell me about.
Learning About Sex from my Aunt’s Cosmopolitans, 1979
1980 is the married man
Striped sweatband over deepening furrows
As he jogs through streets
Named for the Moon landing
Down Apollo Road
Her windowpane in view
1979 still in a quilted robe
Smoke rings tap the light fixture
Break up in the atmosphere
Sea of Tranquility Lane
With its mottled sidewalk
Requires more focus
For a while it had been enough
Showing up with strong perfume and tickets to musicals
Searching her junk drawer while she showered
Fingers slipping through coins, twine, pipe cleaners
Tubes of paint he pressed
Just to make an indentation
Eagle Court
To Launching Road
Her kettle boils and through lace curtains
His form hurls
Around the loop
Once more
How to Break a Broody Hen
First you must find her
For they conceal themselves
Under blackberry bushes or beneath the neighbors’ rotting porch
Or if she has stayed put
Move her into a cage
With a wire floor
Until the urge has passed
Be certain that
She will peck you, hard
You will feel her loss
A broody hen fears no predator
If you manage to restrain her
Remove the eggs first
But be warned
She may start over
Unhatched eggs can rot and burst
Yet she will remain
A broody hen will sit for 21 days
Or longer still if nothing hatches
She will sit all day, every day
Without food, or water
Flat and angry
As hard as it is to break a broody hen
It is harder still to force one
To spread her feathers over a nest
Forgo food, water, shelter
Sacrifice her place in the flock
And resolve
To each soundless
ceramic-smooth object beneath
I will protect you
Kirsti Sandy is an English professor at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. Her essay collection, She Lived and the Other Girls Died, was awarded the Bauhan Press Monadnock Essay Collection Prize for 2018 and her essay "I Have Come for What Belongs to Me" won the Raven Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her work can be found in Under the Gum Tree, Prick of the Spindle, Natural Bridge, and The Boiler, among other journals.