1 poem
The Bridge
Boredom. Everything is boredom. Beauty, especially.
Climbing up the steps to the bridge, night falls.
Fire fighters, in a small apartment lot,
spray a hose gently over the concrete,
and I watch them from above.
The red lights of the truck are on, but with no sound.
The red light rides on the glaze of water.
They are bleeding out the snake, so it can be useful again.
The liquid from the mouth moves like sound waves
over the ground, wave after wave,
saying: My life feels meaningless, but it is not.
If I describe something, anything, long enough,
language will lead me back to wanting it.
The snake I found long ago coiled and was still.
An ant crawled over the scales on its back.
That detail, especially, possessed me:
I noticed an ant. Roving the scales.
The hose says:
A body ends at the crank used to circle it back around.
Use the crank. Circle it around. The body ends.
The wind says:
I was near the girders, looking down,
feeling the vibrations on the rails and riding them.
The water says:
Cross the bridge. Walk through the town.
Gabrielle Bates is a Southern writer currently living in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, among other journals, and her debut collection Judas Goat was recently named a finalist for the Bergman Prize. You can connect with her at www.gabriellebat.es, on Twitter (@GabrielleBates), or on Instagram (@gabrielle_bates_).