Time Under a Bridge
by Lisa Breger

Runner-Up, Ruth Stone Poetry Prize

I don’t want to leave this world:
My friends are in it, and there’s so much beauty.
Even beneath the pigeon-pocked bridge—

the simple steel and concrete off-ramp
seeped with run-off, tubercular,
that runs over roadways and part of the river that leads nowhere—

there’s a park bench, a gathering of squirrels around a stale loaf of bread.
Who wouldn’t spend time here?
Yesterday, along the Greenway under cloudless late January sky,
a flurry of bluebirds sang in the branches.
Today, I follow blue hospital signs

near Boylston, neighborhood of pressure cooker bombs,
and recall survivor Heather Abbot as I take the elevator to the malignancy floor.
Painted toenails on a prosthetic leg.

My deviant cells abnormally split;
high-dose chemotherapies
target and destroy.

She decided they take the leg to heal the body.
I shut my eyes and see the harbor:
gulls squawk over fishing boats along the docks,
dive for entrails, fish heads, and carry them satisfied through salt air.Best Sneakers | Travis Scott x Air Jordan 6 “British Khaki” & Apparel Collection

By Miciah Bay Gault

Miciah Bay Gault is the editor of Hunger Mountain at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She's also a writer, and her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Sun Magazine, The Southern Review, and other fine journals. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont with her husband and children.