Cleveland, 1962

I’m glad I went with my father

to see the bridge abutment going nowhere.

He had seen it when he drove by

in his City bus, was curious, told me

with some excitement, and I, fourteen

and usually bored, for some reason

said I’d go. And so we drove down

trashed deserted streets to the dead-end

where a bridge out over the tracks

was gone now, all but the huge orange

metal braces, some cables the size

of my father’s waist, and he told me

how it must have been, showed me

on the street across where it must

have joined, how you must have been

able then to drive right over

to Little Italy, and I smiled and nodded.

I think I did.

* * * * *

Gail Rudd Entrekin is Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press and Editor of the online environmental literary magazine, Canary (www.canarylitmag.org).  She is Editor of the poetry anthology Yuba Flows (2007) and the poetry & short fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra (2002).

Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary magazines, including Cimarron Review, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and Southern Poetry Review, were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod International Journal in 2011, and won the Women’s National Book Association Award in 2016. 

Entrekin taught poetry and English literature at California colleges for 25 years.  Her books of poetry include The Art of Healing (with Charles Entrekin) (Poetic Matrix Press 2016); Rearrangement of the Invisible, (Poetic Matrix Press, 2012); Change (Will Do You Good) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2005), which was nominated for a Northern California Book Award; You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998); and John Danced (Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press, 1983).  She and her husband, poet and novelist Charles Entrekin, live in the hills of San Francisco’s East Bay.