My Body as Hot Metal, My Body as Ornithology
for Pittsburgh
1.
Everyone has a favorite
bridge. Liberty, Andy Warhol,
The Rachel Carson, West End.
Crows with eyes dark as little,
shiny mussels would nestle
together on the golden beams
above the river and scream
like the steel scalded their claws.
The first boy who strummed
my ribs gently in college had a lifeline
on his palm, riddled as a cable,
that I would trace in his sweltering
apartment. His room thrummed
with a fan, a hushed echo that blocked
the calls of birds in the morning.
I used to think his arms across
my bare chest were trusses.
Now, when I close my eyes, I see
him standing on the other shore.
I never told him how my father
was a thief, how he would climb
fences in the zoos we would visit
when I was a child and steal
plumage from the bird cages.
My sister and I would brush
the feathers up and down our chins.
We kept them scattered in a drawer
in our bedroom, piles of soft combs.
When the boy closes his eyes,
does he remember the light
barbs of my fingertips? Does he
see my elbows as the arches
of the South 10th Street Bridge
cradling thousands of crows?
2.
The Smithfield Street Bridge is said to be the oldest steel bridge in the United States.
But before, there was only wood stretched over the Monongahela, and then a second
bridge, too small and cramped, like the house I lived in my senior year of college,
built in 1910. There was a gnat infestation in the summer, the ceiling caved in three
times, and the windows were painted shut. I dreamt once that the plaster collapsed
in a flood, the gutters exploding like dozens of thrushes bursting into the evening sky.
In the same week, the upstairs neighbor punched a hole in the wall near the staircase, and my
roommate’s ex-boyfriend almost broke into our house. I didn’t wake up, didn’t notice
the kitchen knife was missing. Seven months later, we ran barefoot through the Schenley
park fountain, my legs light as the cool summer air, as though my bones were hollow
bearings. I always held my mace, thumbing it like a rosary, but that night I was more
of the egg than the bird, ready to split and crumble to the pulsing heat inside me.
In the hallway of our home, the hole was still there. I lined my knuckles
to the outline of my neighbor’s fist, the groove of her anger. I am not afraid.
The first Smithfield Street Bridge was swallowed by flames, the cinder dust the only evidence
of before. I like to think that herons evolved from dinosaurs, survived meteor showers, open-
mouthed, asking the future to feed them new bodies, and that my fingerprints linger on the wall
of that house, so hundreds of years from now, archeologists will dig up Dawson Street, pulling
roots from beer bottles, lace chokers, and condoms, and tap their shovels against the mound of
earth that still holds a part of me and say, Look, look. See how much we have changed.
3.
Birds can feel
but not touch.
Something to do
with vibrations
from the wind
against their feathers.
I’m trying to notice
more. I’m trying
to remember the last
time I wore purple
lipstick, the dampness
of my friend’s shoulders,
her hair smelling of PBR
and smoke, as I lifted her
from the snow. Back then,
my hands were like
the Fort Duquesne Bridge:
“The bridge to nowhere.”
The ramps left unfinished,
closed off for over twenty years.
In 1964, Frederick Williams
drove across the bridge,
through the barriers,
and met the water’s edge.
He lived, never explaining
why he attempted the flight.
I’m trying to let my hands
be the car window
Williams broke through,
as he stumbled into the North Side,
unaware that for years after,
engineers would stare
at the gaping bridge against
the pulmonary blue sky and whisper,
impossible, impossible.
Hours before I dusted
snowflakes from my friend’s
hair, a yinzer clutched
my arm in a dark bar.
He told me how he dragged
his couch into the middle
of the street and set it on fire.
We defeated those goddamn Eagles.
If I press my wrist to my mouth,
I can still feel the burn of his thumb
on my pulse, a drumming that pecks
away at the pith of my lips.
I’m trying to convince myself
that Williams felt the same
burn as he stomped on the gas pedal.
That my chest holds more than flesh.
An alive humming under bone.