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Kirsti Sandy

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