The Viaduct of Madrid by Anita Haas (LANDMARKS Series)

The Viaduct of Madrid
by Anita Haas

The first time I saw you, illuminated
in your evening glory, I had lost my way. Running
up Toledo Street, hurrying
to meet a friend in Plaza Mayor, I rounded
the wrong corner and you commanded, “Stop!
Forget your silly worries! Look at me!”

Noble eagle, servile slave, you stretch your spine, crook
your elbows, bow your head. Your shoulders carry
a load of heedless traffic, pressing on you from one
set of fingers buried in the Moorish quarter
to the other, in opulent parks and palaces,
your wingspan – your yoke – bridging two worlds, and
– your back to the city – you look down
            on crumbling walls that once protected the town,
            on a park dedicated to its founder, an emir of Muslim Córdoba,
            on travelers passing through you like a gate,
            on the Segovia road, once a creek, the banks of which
housed the earliest settlers.

You shelter the homeless, watch helplessly
as the desperate leap from your shoulders, their ghosts
staring stunned at the spots where their bodies hit road.

Like a medieval fortress, stone steps race up
and down your slopes like beetles, resting on tree-shrouded
landings, where lovers tryst, and photographers snipe
at infinite angles, each frame bathed
in unique light, and cradled by arms
dressed in foliage.

War once crippled your mighty columns
Yet still you arch and gleam majestic
like a dancer, frozen in an ecstatic olé.

PHOTO: Segovia Viaduct, Madrid, Spain, by Miguel Braulio.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Segovia Viaduct is a concrete bridge in Madrid, Spain. The location was previously the site of an iron bridge built in 1874. Sixty years later, in 1934, a concrete bridge, similar to the one that stands today, replaced it — and, during the 1970s, the site was refurbished and expanded, but the basic design remained the same.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anita Haas is a differently abled, award-winning Canadian writer and teacher based in Madrid, Spain. She has published books on film, two novelettes, a short story collection, and articles, poems and fiction in both English and Spanish. Her poetry has appeared in Quantum Leap, River Poets Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Vox Poetica, Verse Virtual, Wink, Songs of Eretz, Parody Magazine, and Founder’s Favourites. She spends her free time watching films, and enjoying tapas and flamenco with her writer husband and two cats.

Continent’s Edge by Jeanine Stevens (LANDMARKS Series)

Continent’s Edge
by Jeanine Stevens

Imagine a shoreline, its own salty foam.
Not by Muir Beach or Shelter Cove
but just beyond Red Hawk Casino—gold country:
scrub oaks and ghost pines.
Granite outcrops and below, ocean floor basalt,
marl‘s crumbly clay, shell fragments.
This is Wakamatsu Colony (1869), Japanese
farmers attempting to grow silk, tea trees, rice.
Where are the dwellings, bamboo groves?
Someone would know, perhaps
a grad student researching ancestry.
Near the trail, buttercups, vetch, Rat Tail radish
(a delicacy in Asia). I nibble spicy pods.
Streambeds dry, few miners’ flakes remain.
You may discover garnets in your shallow pan.
Over the foot bridge, simple joy
to walk planks: bounce, sponge, lift.
Tides, first sensory,
something of womb, suck
pull back—thrum tide.
Under a perigee moon, I wonder if bedrock
heaves, upends remains of shellfish?
Behind the electric fence, a Jersey mother has tender eyes.
Long time since I’ve been close to such
a large mammal, her heat shimmering,
dancing in amber sun.

Two identical calves recline,
slowly munching meadow grass.

PHOTO: Wakamatsu Farm in 2019, its 150th year, by Ken Mahar.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony was made up of a group of 22 samurai and one woman during the Boshin Civil War (1868–69) in Japan preceding the Meiji Restoration. This is believed to be the first permanent Japanese settlement in North America and the only settlement by samurai outside of Japan. The group purchased land from Charles Graner family in the Gold Hill region after coming to San Francisco in 1869. Though the group successfully displayed it produce during the 1869 California State Agricultural Fair in Sacramento and the 1870 Horticultural Fair in San Francisco, the farm as a Japanese colony only existed from 1869-1871. In 1969, the year of the colony’s centennial, it was proclaimed California Historical Landmark No. 815. The American River Conservancy purchased the 272-acre location, 50 miles northeast of Sacramento, in November 2010, with the National Park Service placing the site on the National Register of Historic Places.

PHOTO: Historical marker at Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony, Placerville, California.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: When I write in natural settings, it is usually a pattern of walk, stop, listen, and write, then begin again. This goes back to sixth grade and our bird walks every Friday afternoons. The poem “Continents Edge” was written in one afternoon, step by step, with periods of rest so I could to notice even smaller things like the ragged rattail radish and the bouncy footbridge. This pattern works well for me even in cities, say St. Mark’s Square in Venice. There is so much to take in just by sitting on a bench, watching people and pigeons, the Adriatic creeping over the stone steps.

PHOTO: The author and fellow travelers at Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeanine Stevens is the author of Limberlost and Inheritor (Future Cycle Press). Her first poetry collection, Sailing on Milkweed was published by Cherry Grove Collections. She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, The Stockton Arts Commission Award, The Ekphrasis Prize, and WOMR Cape Cod Community Radio National Poetry Award. Brief Immensity, won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Award. Jeanine recently received her sixth Pushcart Nomination. She has participated in Literary Lectures sponsored by Poets and Writers. Her work has appeared in North Dakota Review, Pearl, Stoneboat, Rosebud, Chiron Review, and Forge. Jeanine studied poetry at U.C. Davis and California State University, Sacramento.

Threshold of dreams by Vijaya Gowrisankar (LANDMARKS Series)

Threshold of dreams
by Vijaya Gowrisankar

The blue Maravanthe Beach on one side
and beautiful Souparnika River on the other
We stopped on National Highway 66 and
I made my way down to see the scene
I stood looking at the boat moored
near the steps leading to the river

The shackles of comfort are the price for dreams

The river’s course disappeared
beyond my vision as I saw it bejeweled
with the tall coconut trees, leaning
to reflect their shadows in blue waters
Somewhere, beyond, the borders of distant
hills beckoned one to take risks with
a promise of adventure. I stood, taking
in nature’s beauty…and pondering over life

The shackles of comfort are the price for dreams

Like the boat, I had decisions to make
The comfort of excuses and fears had allowed
many a dream to go unexplored. The road to
dreams, though exciting, was also laden with
uncertainties like the river’s course and tides
Some journeys and decisions are mine to make…alone

The shackles of comfort are the price of dreams

PHOTO: Maravanthe Beach (left) and Souparnika River (right), Kundapura, Karnataka, India, by Amith Nag Photography, used by permission. Boulders have been placed on the beach to create a breakwater that protects the coast from the force of waves and prevents erosion of the shoreline.

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Maravanthe Beach is located on the coast of the Arabian Sea in southwestern India. National Highway 66 runs next to the beach and the Souparnika River flows on the other side of the road, creating spectacular scenery that is considered one of its kind in India.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Time spent amidst nature allows me to reflect on life, my fears, and decisions. Nature inspires me to embrace my unique self. It calms me and often, changes my perspective of life. When I travelled to Udipi via this highway, I was on threshold in life to make decisions. This time helped me in getting a better sense of direction. I wrote this poem using the bop form.

PHOTO: A boat on the Souparnika River near Kundapura, Karnataka, India. (Photo by Vijaya Gowrisankar)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Vijaya Gowrisankar is the author of the poetry collections Inspire, Reflect, Explore, Savour–Art and Poetry meet, Evolve, Shine, and Unlikely Friendships. Cherish is her eighth publication, a collection that captures a spectrum of moments using a variety of poetry forms, quotes, and conversations. Her blog Grow Together shares insights from the greatest influencers and focuses on personal growth. She has been published in over 40 anthologies, has been awarded the AZsacra International Poetry Award (December 2015), and was one of the winners of Inspire by Gandhi competition, organized by Sampad, a UK organization. Visit her blog, Facebook page, and Amazon Author page, and find her on Twitter.

PHOTO: The author during her travels.

Visiting Ulli by Cheryl Levine (LANDMARKS Series)

Visiting Ulli
by Cheryl Levine

I boarded the train at the Santa Lucia station in Venice and headed north, towards the city of Trieste, to visit Ulli. We had met in an on-line forum on Italy and, in particular, the Italian language. She was learning English; I was studying Italian. We wrote long emails to each other in the languages we were hoping to acquire more fluently. She would correct my Italian, and I her English. Through these communications, we shared our love of art and architecture, good books, and tagliatelle with wild boar sauce.

When Ulli learned I was traveling to Venice, she urged me to take the two-hour train ride to visit her in Trieste. She was waiting for me at the train platform, smartly dressed in a slim skirt and blouse, handbag hanging from her folded arm. “We’ve lots to do in a short amount of time,” she declared as we left the train station. I told her what my daughter said before I left home: “Let me get this straight. You’re getting on a train alone and traveling to a city you don’t know to meet some stranger you met on the Internet. If I told you I was doing that, you would kill me.”

Ulli threw her head back and laughed. I felt like I had known her forever.

We had prosciutto, mozzarella, and melon for lunch at Trieste’s well known cafe, Buffet da Pepi. We walked the streets of the city, admiring the Classical architecture, so different from the Baroque and Rococo present in other parts of Italy. For our last stop, we hopped in her little Fiat and drove along the Adriatic Coast to visit the grounds of the stunning Castle Miramare, a famous landmark with sweeping views of the sea below it.

If not for Ulli, I would never have visited this beautiful castle in this beautiful city.

PHOTO: Miramare Castle, Trieste, Italy by Lev Levin, used by permission.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Miramare Castle is a 19th-century castle on the Gulf of Trieste between near Trieste, northeastern Italy. Built from 1856 to 1860 for Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium, it was designed by Carl Junker. The style reflects the artistic interests of the archduke, who was acquainted with the eclectic architectural styles of Austria, Germany and England.  (Source: Wikipedia)

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I enjoy the challenge with travel writing in finding an angle to what the traveler is seeing, hearing, experiencing. In that way, one is not merely stating the facts but digging deeper into the true meaning of travel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Cheryl Levine is a former newspaper columnist and freelance editor. She has had essays published in Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine, 24PearlStreet blog, and Silver Birch Press, and has read for Grub Street’s Tell All Event in Boston. She is currently working on a memoir dealing with a range of intersecting topics from her Italian-American heritage, to parental abandonment and its effects on identity, to scary medical diagnoses. She lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

PHOTO: The author during her travels.

Immigrant Waves by Lowell Murphree (LANDMARKS Series)

Immigrant Waves
by Lowell Murphree

They aren’t much, I know
so very little

coming and going like that
foreign and undependable

a little movement
at the tip of a long Cheatgrass stem

the string of them along
my canal go mostly unnoticed

but this stand alongside the neighbor’s
pasture fence

is the Pacific
subducting at the Coast and

rising in the body of a
Mongolian immigrant stem-waver two hundred fifty miles inland

just as did these hills twelve million years
before we tried to close the borders.

PHOTO: Pictured are Central Washington’s Kittitas Valley, the town of Ellensburg, the Yakama River, and the Manastash Ridge. Photo by Funnerus, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Central Washington’s Kittitas Valley is known for its frequent strong winds that sweep down the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains to the flat land across the Columbia River. Watching the Cheatgrass move in waves along a canal bordering my home was the inspiration for exploring how external forces shaped and continue to form and shape my homeland. Manastash Ridge is a long ridge extending eastward from the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington State. These ridges rose from the earth’s volcanic activity 12 million years ago as a result of the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate under the North American Plate which also pushed up the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges.  They are a spectacular part of the drive eastward from Seattle toward the Columbia River. Manastash Ridge forms the southern border of the Kittitas Valley where I live, a desert valley made verdant by irrigation canals constructed largely by immigrants who settled the valley with the coming of the railroad. Cheatgrass was introduced to the Western states from Eurasia, used initially as packing material and is considered an invasive species.

PHOTO: The author at home in Central Washington’s Kittitas Valley with Cheatgrass and the Manastash Ridge behind him.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lowell Murphree lives and writes in the Kittitas Valley near Ellensburg, Washington.  He works with local and regional early learning nonprofit organizations as a grant writer, board member, and volunteer.

Promontory by Rachel Hawk (LANDMARKS Series)

Promontory
by Rachel Hawk

In August 1965, my friend Barbara and I drove out of Ohio and headed to San Francisco. Unlike our friends, we weren’t ready to get married, buy houses, and have kids. And thought we might never be. We had other dreams and imagined livelier, more varied lives in a beautiful city by the ocean. Because we were nurses, finding work would be easy. Zigzagging across the country, we stopped whenever something caught our fancy. The Golden Spike National Historic Site did just that.

In 1869, two teams of men completed the building of this country’s first transcontinental railroad, laboring toward each other from Iowa and California. For 1,912 miles they  burrowed tunnels, built bridges, and laid down track. It was a massive, arduous, dangerous undertaking. Finally, on May 10th at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, the men hammered a commemorative gold spike into the last, connecting rail, joining east to west. Surrounded by tents, saloons, and boarding houses, the crowd of dignitaries, railroad workers and owners brandished their whiskey bottles, posed for pictures, and cheered. The dangers of crossing multiple raging rivers, deserts, and mountain ranges in horse-drawn wagons had been conquered, making it possible for thousands to travel safely. It had been considered an impossible dream.

When Barbara and I visited, everything — trains, buildings, even the tracks themselves — were gone. As true of many landmarks, there was only a descriptive sign; nothing remained but the story. It was enough. Standing in the wind of that vast beautiful high-desert plain, the excitement of a great endeavor caught us. This was a monument not only to hard work and accomplishment, but also to dreams — and we had our own.

PHOTOGRAPH: National Park Service sign for the Golden Spike National Historic Site, Promontory Summit, Utah, by Sue Smith, used by permission.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Between 1863 and 1869, as many as 20,000 Chinese workers helped build the treacherous western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad that began in Sacramento, California. When not enough white men signed up, the railroad began hiring Chinese men for the backbreaking labor. Chinese workers blasted tunnels through mountains, cut through dense forests, filled deep ravines, constructed long trestles, and built enormous retaining walls. Chinese workers were paid 30-50% less than their white counterparts and were given the most dangerous work. As they approached the meeting point with the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, thousands of Chinese workers laid down 10 miles of track in less than 24 hours. Progress came at great cost: Chinese civic organizations retrieved an estimated 1,200 bodies along the route and sent them to China for burial. The transcontinental railroad’s completion allowed travelers to journey across the country in a week — a trip that had previously taken more than a month. Politicians pointed to the country’s great achievement, failing to mention the foreign-born workers who had made it possible.

Source: “Remember the Chinese immigrants who built America’s first transcontinental railroad” by Gordon H. Chang, professor of history, Stanford University, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2019.

PHOTO: Chinese workers toil in a treacherous stretch of the Transcontinental Railroad in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, late 1860s. (Source: National Park Service.)

PHOTO: Ceremony on May 10, 1969 for installing the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, representing the completion of the First U.S. Transcontinental Railroad. At center left, Samuel S. Montague, Central Pacific Railroad, shakes hands with Grenville M. Dodge, Union Pacific Railroad (center right). They are surrounded by men who built the railway — but Chinese workers are noticeably absent. Many of the laborers who worked their way west on the Union Pacific Railroad were Irish immigrants — about 3,000 in all, many of whom were veterans of the Union Army in the Civil War. They, too, faced dangerous working conditions and hardships. Photo: Andrew J. Russell, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, used by permission.)

PHOTO: In 2014, on the 145th anniversary of the first transcontinental railroad’s completion at Promontory Summit, Utah, a group of Asian-Americans, including descendants of Chinese railroad workers, recreate the iconic photo taken without their ancestors in 1869. Photo (c) Corky Lee, All Rights Reserved. 

PHOTO: Plaque at Promontory Summit, Utah, placed in 1969 to commemorate the centennial of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad and to honor “the Chinese workers of the Central Pacific Railroad whose indomitable courage made it possible.”

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Today, at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, visitors can see full-sized exact replicas of the original (and colorful!) Victorian-era locomotives. According to the National Park Service website, the site now features a visitors’ center as well as driving tours, hiking trails, and re-enactments of driving the Last Spike.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rachel Hawk facilitates a weekly writers’ forum. Her personal essays explore both the interior world of the narrator and the nuances within relationships. Her current work utilizes elements of memoir in narrative form.

History Talks in a Boneyard by Ellaraine Lockie (LANDMARKS Series)

History Talks in a Boneyard
by Ellaraine Lockie

It began as Boot Hill
Separated by the town from Protestant
and Catholic cemeteries
From their public-park-like preservation

Here heathens and the impoverished
lie eternally under wild grasses
weeds, sagebrush and gopher holes
Corralled by a barbed wire fence
whose missing links create a gate

A few cement block headstones
as decomposed as the bodies beneath
whisper identities in broken English
kanji and hiragana
But the list at the library speaks
loud and clear enough to be heard over
three generations of neglect

With names of Chang, Tanisaki
Cloudy Buffalo, Fugimoto, Mutoo
Nakamoto, Flying Man, Jones, O’Neal
Kirschweng, McGrew and Monteath
Labels of Chinaman, Japanese, Indian
Poor House, Breed, Half-breed, White, Negro
French, Irish, German, Scotch and American

Listed causes of death as direct as the crows
that fly above the burial ground
As socially unsheltered as Montana cowboys
Suicide, alcoholism, gunshot wounds
murder, horse and railroad accidents
amputation, scalding, spasms
exhaustion and unknown

The name became Mt. Hope
A plea answered four times a year
when a Hill County worker
mows the gophers’ pasture
The boneyard guarded by an occasional
Chinese zodiac animal gravestone
guillotined by vandals and time

Originally published in Poetry Cemetery.

PHOTO: Sign at Mt. Hope Cemetery, Havre, Montana.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I grew up in a tiny wheat farming town in Montana, and my family made trips to the bigger town of Havre for weekly shopping, medical appointments, movies, etc. Even with those consistent trips, I was unaware of the existence of Havre’s two separate cemeteries. It wasn’t until one of my adult annual summer stays in my hometown, which still includes weekly trips to Havre for the same reasons, that I became aware of the ramshackle second cemetery where the non-Christians are buried. I was instantly interested in its history and traced it through the local public library. Of course, the poet in me went right to work.

PHOTO: Gravestones at Mt. Hope Cemetery, Havre, Montana, by Kay Young, 1979 (Library of Congress, Montana Folklife Survey Collection).

EDITOR’S NOTE: About 50 miles from the Canada border in north central Montana, Havre was founded in the late 1800s to serve as a service center for the Great Northern Railway, due to its location midway between Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul.  Originally named “Bullhook Bottoms,” the town held a series of meetings to determine a new name. The original settlers had the final decision, and thanks to a strong French influence, the town was renamed “Havre,” after Le Havre, France. (Source: Wikipedia.)

PHOTO: Saddle Butte, Havre, Montana, postcard designed by KermaB available at zazzle.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ellaraine Lockie’s recent poems have won the 2019 Poetry Super Highway Contest, the Nebraska Writers Guild’s Women of the Fur Trade Poetry Contest, and New Millennium’s Monthly Musepaper Poetry Contest. Her fourteenth chapbook, Sex and Other Slapsticks, has been released from Presa Press. Previous chapbooks have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch Magazine in England, and the Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award. Her poems have found their ways onto broadsides, buses, rented cars, bicycles, cabins, greeting cards, keychains, bookmarks, mugs, coffee sack labels, church bulletins, radio shows, and cable TV. Ellaraine serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, LILIPOH.

Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.

C L I M B I N G by Robert Lima (LANDMARKS Series)

C L I M B I N G
by Robert Lima

I see myself climbing,
not the Matterhorn, not
Picos de Europa, not
Kilimanjaro, nor the
highest peak of all —
Mount Everest . . .

I see myself climbing
Huayna Picchu in Perú,
teat of the Inca world
with its milk of mist.

It is set higher than its
sister Machu Picchu and
offers aerial vistas of the river
Urubamba and the deep valleys.

I see myself climbing its
steep inclines, foot upon foot,
clinging to the rock face
as bits dislodge in karmic fall
into the waiting precipice.

I see myself climbing, fear and
tremor at each step of the steep
ascent, ever reaching higher
to attain the mountain’s sacred self.

PHOTO: At nearly nine thousand feet above sea level, Huayna Picchu (center) overlooks Machu Picchu, the so-called “Lost City of the Incas.” (Photo by Izabela 23, used by permission.)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Huayna Picchu is a mountain in southern Peru that rises over Machu Picchu, a 15th century Inca citadel. The Incas built a trail up the side of the Huayna Picchu and erected temples and terraces on the mountain ridge. The peak of Huayna Picchu is 8,835 ft above sea level, about 850 ft higher than Machu Picchu. (Source: Wikipedia.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Lima is a Cuban-born, award-winning poet, as well as an internationally recognized critic, bibliographer, playwright, and translator. As a Greenwich Village poet during the 1960s, he read at coffeehouses and other venues, co-edited Seventh Street. Poems of Les Deux Megots, introduced by Denise Levertov, and the second series of Judson Review. His 15 poetry collections include Celestials, Elementals, Sardinia/Sardegna, Ikons of the Past: Poetry of the Hispanic Americas, and Writers on My Watch (2020). Over 600 of his poems have appeared in print in the U.S. and abroad. Eleven of his poems have just appeared in Greek translation in Noima Magazine. Among his numerous critical studies are works on García Lorca, Valle-Inclán, Borges, Surrealism, folklore, dramatic literature, and translations of plays and poetry.

Hermitage: Grand Canyon, 2015 by Jagari Mukherjee (LANDMARKS Series)

Hermitage: Grand Canyon, 2015
by Jagari Mukherjee

Taking in the Grand Canyon
from its South Rim,
slowly sipping a tall hot apple cider
I discover my own hermitage.

The interiors of my being
feel the balm.
Sore splinters of the past find relief.
I build a cool stone shelter
where dream catchers hang from walls
and Hopi dolls fill the shelves.

The nights are lit only by stars
cut into the velvet paper of the black sky.
With sunrise, I worship
the Vishnu and Shiva temple peaks
reddening at dawn.

I stir pink prickly pear syrup
into my coffee, and wonder how I,
(who apparently have nothing),
am the happiest person on earth.

PHOTO: The Grand Canyon by Sojy John on Unsplash

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I first visited the US (where my sister lives) in 2015 with my parents. It was our first family vacation after 10 years. We visited several places, but our hands-down favorite was the Grand Canyon. We took a cottage on the South Rim and had the most wonderful time. It was possibly the happiest moment of my life. Even today, whenever I think of the Grand Canyon, I am filled with what Wordsworth calls “the bliss of solitude.”

PHOTO: The author at the Grand Canyon (2015).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jagari Mukherjee is a gold medalist in English Literature, a Best of the Net 2018 nominee, as well as a DAAD scholar from Technical University (Dresden, Germany) and a Bear River alumna. Her poems and other creative pieces have been published in different venues both in India and abroad. Her latest book, The Elegant Nobody, was published by Hawakal Publishers in January 2020. She is the winner of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 for Book Review, Poeisis Award for Excellence in Poetry 2019, as well as the recipient of the Reuel International Prize For Poetry 2019, among other awards. She is a part of the Reviews team at The Blue Nib.

Once, in Pittsburgh by Mary C. McCarthy (LANDMARKS Series)

Once, in Pittsburgh
by Mary C. McCarthy

my home town, city of three rivers
and many bridges, steel city,
moving from its dark
industrial past
toward the shining dream
of a tech renaissance,
moving sometimes so fast
a project was half done
before they knew
how to end it…
Like our “Bridge to Nowhere”
arching up and over the river
but with nowhere to land —
hanging there for years
ending in a 90-foot drop
to the water,
access blocked to stop
people driving right off,
though one guy did it —
crashed through the barricade
and sailed off the end in his car,
surviving, as part of the story
we liked to tell ourselves
about our crazy, daring,
restless luck.

There one night, at loose ends
somewhere
between midnight and morning,
the three of us, each one the first
from our family to go to college,
looking for something
to fill the space
between when the bars closed
and our sober-up breakfast
at Ritter’s diner,
decided to climb up on that bridge
and stand suspended
over the drop
without destination
or direction
with nothing to count on or expect,
no sure conclusion
but the deep pull of vertigo
in the wind’s buffet
and the sough of steel
intent on its own trajectory-

A lesson sudden and strong enough
to scare us back
from the tipsy lip of temptation
to roads more safe and boring
that crossed rivers in the ordinary ways
and ended up in places
almost as familiar
as those we always knew.

PHOTO: The Fort Duquesne Bridge (formerly “Bridge to Nowhere”), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by Mihai Andritoiu, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The Bridge to Nowhere was a temporary landmark but hard to forget. Our late-night encounter seemed just right in terms of our own uncertainties at the time, taking off in directions no one was used to even in imagination — something new in our family histories, well outside the comfort zone.

PHOTO: Fort Duquesene Bridge — The Bridge to Nowhere — in 1966.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Fort Duquesne Bridge spans the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was called “The Bridge to Nowhere” because the main span was finished in 1963, but due to delays in acquiring right of ways for approach ramps, it did not connect on the north side of the Allegheny River. The lack of approach ramps meant the bridge ended in midair, rendering it useless. On December 12, 1964, Frederick Williams, a 21-year-old chemistry major at the University of Pittsburgh, drove his 1959 Chrysler station wagon through the bridge’s wooden barricades, raced off the end of the bridge, and landed upside-down but unhurt on the other side.The northwestern ramps were completed in 1969, allowing access to Pennsylvania Route 65. (Source: Wikipedia)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary C. McCarthy has studied art and literature, and has always been a writer, though most of her working life was spent as a Registered Nurse. Her work has appeared in many print and electronic journals and anthologies, and she has an electronic chapbook, Things I Was Told Not to Think About, available as a free download from Praxis magazine.