Tuesday 13 June 2017

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. 




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