My old walk to work used to take me over a bridge. Actually bridge isn’t even right because it wasn’t anything like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Gowanus Canal even. It wasn’t over some small brook or stream. It was over a highway full of exhaust fumes and noise. Still, each morning I would look at the things left on the bridge, the forgotten, the misbegotten, the lost, the garbage, the toys, the love notes, the shoes, books, broken things. I used to think about the parts of myself that were left, the things that we all slough off -cheap tokens to prove that we were once real. That we did live here in this moment in time after all.
So I wrote this poem entitled What the Bridge Says and the kind folks at Misfit Miscellany decided to publish it here.
Maybe they left something on the bridge too.
Also I stole the title from this Frida Kahlo painting, entitled What I Saw in the Water or What the Water Gave Me.
Ally Malinenko 