~
The George Washington Bridge
Trying to escape the city,
you’re a passenger, idle and bored,
in this George Washington Bridge
traffic jam, late night, early winter,
pop folderol on the radio
hours and miles unspooling toward
wherever you mean to go.
Cars and trucks tunneled
side by side in exclusive lanes
alternately shunt ahead, pause,
roll forward, surge, stop,
creep, stop, inch, stop.
You pass a van on the right,
then it slides alongside,
even with your car window,
and you glance over
at the rented U-Haul as the driver
reaches into his wide-open mouth,
reaches with pliers into his mouth,
and you know he’s pulling a tooth,
pulling out his own tooth as if
yanking a nail from a fencepost.
All windows tightly closed, spared
any outcry of anguish or relief,
what else to do but keep going,
flee, as the parade of intimate traffic
quickens, disbands on the turnpike
and at last you’re free?
But not free of the wondering,
wondering when you see,
despite halting progress,
an anguish no amount of sympathy
can assuage. Old bridges
named for old heroes
seem to lead to no
where else
for the estranged and dispossessed,
whose festering torment
impels self-inflicted violence
as remedy.
~
Co-winner of Reed Magazine‘s Edwin Markham Prize (2019), Jeanne Julian is the author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Poetry Quarterly, Lascaux Prize 2016 Anthology, Minerva Rising and other journals and have won awards from The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and the North Carolina Poetry Society. www.jeannejulian.com