Birmingham Bridge Post #10: Carrying On

I'll address this to everyone today.

The seasons almost blend together. There is always rain. 

This morning I went on a run in the cool, post-rain wind. It stormed last night for about three hours and then just poured on the city. I sat in Schenley Park, behind the Frick Fine Arts Building, tried to find some quiet to write in. When there is good weather in Pittsburgh the whole city comes out to revel in it. I finally settled far enough away from the other college students and high school students, but close enough to hear a little league baseball coach yelling encouragement to eight year olds. With music, notebook, and pen I found a small amount of serenity for an hour. It started to thunder and lightening a cool twenty minutes before anything else happened. God was warning us that shit was going to hail down, literally. I paid no attention, smiling at the prospect of getting wet, of being vulnerable and unprotected against the storm.

I braced myself with a playlist and carried on. It wasn’t until I felt big, hard drops, something like hail, that I decided to pack it in. I knew I wouldn’t beat getting soaked, but that maybe I shouldn’t get caught in a flood. As I stepped into the street to cross to the bus stop the water came up over my ankles. I saw small bits of leaves and dirt stuck to my thighs as Jason Mraz’s “A Beautiful Mess” blasted my soul through the turmoil from the sky. As I stood under the bus stop shelter I started to get a little cold, no longer walking to keep my body warm. When the bus came I plunged into the street. The bus driver yelled at me, saying that she was trying to pick me up at the curb so I didn’t have to do that. I smiled, thinking of how none of that matters. 

It was no longer such a heavy rain once I was walking home from the bus stop. I stayed out there as long as I could as the rain started to cool to a lower temperature on my dress and fleece jacket. I walked into the house dripping, unbelieving of how new I felt. Peeling my clothes off I was pretty cold. It was the first time I’d felt uncomfortable through this. I thought of the Birmingham Bridge and how it would look after this shower.

This morning I went for a run at 7am. The bridge, even rusted, looked cleaner, the concrete path wasn’t full of as much litter and spilled food. My skin breathed and shook as the wind grazed it while my legs pumped. It wasn’t long before I was just walking and thinking. A friend recently told me to take a walk and cry, that I’d feel better. But now I know that grief isn’t just tears.

This semester I learned the importance of rain and water to my relationship with the bridge and my writing in general. Without these three rivers we are surrounded with in Pittsburgh there wouldn’t be any refuge on the bridge for me, without the rain that so often visits this city the river wouldn’t be as vast, the waters as changing and new, they’d be equally as filled with pollution as they were fifty years ago. I, too, feel new as well as rusted in the rain. My skin feels so smooth as I stand in the downpour but when it stops it dries cold and my skin ashes. I feel human then. 

I learned to move from eroticism and fantasy to the more human aspect of my relationship with the Birmingham Bridge and its surroundings. It took until nearly the end of the semester for me to understand that I came to the bridge as a place to sweat and breath away my sorrow and pain. I finally found a way to write through grief, by letting the subject of my writing be something other than my grandma or my own struggle. The subject became Birmingham’s relationship to the old Brady Street Bridge, what the bridges do for the surrounding neighborhoods, what the relationship between the bridges and the waters are, and the cars, birds, and graffiti I found on the bridge. 

I came to understand prose a little more, rather than just prose poetry. I’m still working at it, but my writing has changed with the seasons. As warmth is becoming more certain my words are clearer and my prose more strategic. I still hold onto lyric but now am getting the hang of telling a full story. When I first looked at the bridge I saw a cold, dead thing with potential. Now I look at the bridge and I see the cracks and crevices I’ve stood at and run over and around. I see the rust it took so long to notice, because I held the bridge at arm’s length creating it in perfection in my mind. 

I am now able to contextualize the bridge as a part of a larger relationship with Pittsburgh’s history. Like getting to know someone those details have become essential to what I feel about my place, the Birmingham Bridge. I’m not sure I’ll ever know another place so deeply, or a place that will help me without saying a word or moving. 

I am unable to separate my growth as a person with my growth as a writer this semester. They are one in the same for me. I write to ease the tension in my mind, the same reason I run. By actively forming this relationship to the bridge I bonded those two things together. I’m not sure they were ever supposed to be separate. It is as gloomy out today as it was that first day I walked upon the bridge and decided it would be my subject. It is much warmer out with no snow. But somehow I feel the sun pushing at the clouds in a way winter sun doesn’t. Somehow I feel like I am that sun behind those clouds trying to break and illuminate, to let the bridge and other non-moving pieces of the city warm their bodies because they cannot move on like I can.  

Blog Post #9: The Work

Here we are “Spring” bellowing down on your concrete and steel body. Do you sunbathe, Birmingham? I wish you could know what some things are like. 

Yesterday I went to Highland Park with the boys. I pushed Rocco on the swings and watched his deep brown eyes glisten in the sun as his three year old face twisted in delight. His cheeks were plush against the wind. We switched between “Weee!” “Boo!” and “Don’t let go!” He must have felt like he was flying, must have felt like Spiderman when he let go for that one second before I caught him and told him, “No, we don’t want you to fall out,” and tickled the top of his belly. His outrageous, breathy giggle against the push of the wind panted as if to say, “This feels like work.” A kid’s workday at the park.

His dad and uncle came up to the park after moving the couch. Well at least I got to steal the little one for an hour. I stood as the park stilled. Dan flew past me to chase Rocco, pick him up, and anxiously fly him through the air as if it’s been a lifetime. I didn’t even see him coming until he was past me. It took a while for me to notice Dave standing next to me. I couldn’t stop thinking, how could I love this little thing that is in no way mine? I’m not even sure what my place is here. Something new. 

Have you ever felt that way, Birmingham? That mysterious hunger, that vibrant chill on your skin fighting against the warmth of the first “Spring” sun on your spine and in your breath? 

This is what it’s like: You don’t know what it is that tells you to dig your feet in the warm dirt and close your eyes to the warm wind, the distant sun, the world that tells you to work and not enjoy. Something tells you to remember.

Have you dreamed of this day, when something so innately unpossessed, or so impossibly not yours, could in some way become your own? 

*

You’re blossoming today. The sun is almost hiding those scars you have, those pieces of skin that peel dark gray. Do you feel the splashes of the river? Does it cleanse you or make you shudder? 

What if one day you were dismantled and fell slowly into that body of water? Would you cup over the top of it, spill it into our city? How would you handle such displacement, such stress? 

Who would pick you up? 

Maybe you, too, would retreat into a reality that you’ve learned to always make a fantasy, always learn to be unsettled. Learn to be ready to go. Now there are no attachments, a single body in the world, a single body in the water. Get up and fly. It’s “Spring.” This is when we learn to be new. 

Blog Post #8: Away (almost) in the Garden

My grandma is dead. Her house still stands, decaying and darkened like her/like her insides/the plush inside her coffin as comforting as the remaining decorations in her house. I walk in, first time since January - the time my mom enlisted only me to help clean out the house. 

It looks like she was robbed: an empty orange rug, stained yellow with age, the walls a color I can’t even begin to understand. The love seat remaining is sunken in and stuffed with bags of her things to give away. We won’t tell them they wear the belongings of a dead woman. 

Somehow the umbrella bin still hugs the backside of the front door. The musk is as unreal as the darkness/as unreal as the haunted-housing-creaking staircase/unreal as it all is. I never look the same in the hallway mirror. I, too, look unreal. I was so happy growing up, walking up and down the stairs, modeling for the hallway, dressing with my brothers in our grandparents’ clothes. I look like a ghost in the landscape spread mirror. 

This isn’t grief. This is life/where I water the flowers/where the aloe plant that’s been in our family for two generations will die/where no one can save this place/save this.

Only one more light in the house works. Thank goodness for the Easter warmth. Even in the rain and wind it is almost fifty degrees. It was winter when she died. It has been freezing in this house since then.

She didn’t die here. She died next door. In my aunt’s house/in her hospital bed/in the pink covers we got her/in the clothes we dressed her in/in her body: some hell. 

It was always so fucking hot in there. My frail grandmother so cold/thin/bone/chilled, we blasted three feet tall space heaters in all free spaces of the living room, for her. The walls overflowed with medications, bandages, morphine/dripping from the bags.

I imagined it dripping from the walls one night, then catching on fire with the old-fashioned space heater. I imagined dying with her, taking the row house/her row house/my aunt’s, with us. 

I dreamed of the garden outside, somehow alive again. I came back. She didn’t. I stand at her kitchen door, now. There is a large piece of wet wood underneath the handle of the door to make sure no one gets in. Everybody knows us, here. No one will come in. No one will go out. I put my hand on the wood. I could kill someone with this. I could break these glass cabinets, this menagerie, these good dishes, the whiskey glasses, the windows. I could break out. 

I keep thinking I’ll open the door. I stand there. My mom calls, interrupts from the other end of the phone, from next door, “What’s wrong?” I breathe, say, “Nothing. Just finished watering the plants.” Her voice wavers. She knows. My hand is still on the door. I think of the garden beyond the backdoor, barred with our backyard tree’s wood. The garden that is death/the everything that is dead, here. 

Nature Post #7: A Historical Nature

What degree of separation are we from the sources we are made from? 

Birmingham, I am nothing more than flesh and bone, than old pollution-breathing asthma. I am nothing more than a city girl wondering of my place here. 

I live in one of the most confusing parts of town. It is currently called Uptown. There is a sign at the edge of your body that sparkles Welcome to Uptown. On my street, Seneca, there is a mural. In the mural is embedded Soho, a previous name of the neighborhood. Tustin runs perpendicular to here. James Tustin: the reason why my neighborhood exists. 

It seems that Brits could never stop colonizing. James Tustin settled and began to build homes of English architecture and fruit orchards. He named us Soho. He gave me the mulberry tree that still stands and scatters fruit all through our grass and concrete that lives in the fences of our walls. This used to be the most beautiful place in the city. 1915.   The Post Gazette. 

Not a mere ten years later we stopped being beautiful. We were old and unattractive, we were populated now by the poor migrant mill workers, we were no longer a beautifully built nature.

How strong, how weak, are we?

My house is decaying. Still, we live. Our landlords are amicable enough: housemate/friend Thomas, and his parents. Good-natured Virginians. They’ve got this house and the one on Tustin. They fix us up the best they can. The roof leaks into my room, specifically on my bed. The ceiling in the bathroom is cracked all the way through from Hurricane Sandy rain. The woods and walls do not match, but they hold. They are not beautiful but we know where they came from, how they were built, rebuilt, painted, repainted, nailed, hammered, and solidified. We know where we came from.

The rooms that have closets are brick wall inside. There is nowhere to hide.

 No one knows us beyond Duquesne University and Mercy Hospital. Five blocks past. Ten blocks past. Here you are: Seneca. Tustin. People know Jumonville, where the buses turn up the hill to Fifth Avenue. It is the last stop light before Brady Street. 

We are a ghost town here, they say, since 1977 when it was official that the wealth moved out and urban renewal setbacks kicked in. It used to be hip here, used to be made of something solid like steel. But now, it is abandoned buildings, closed shops, dead/gray, brown, dark reds, and tans. This side of Uptown is riddled with parking lots used for the Consol Energy Center visitors, Downtown workers, and Oakland residents. 

But, here we are. Here we are Birmingham. We still climb the billboards, straddle the concrete of the Parkway Blvd of the Allies. We still party. We still act as if we’ve got a wild soul. We are not dead of nature. 

But what is nature, if not wild?

Just because we don’t look as welded together as the bridge, as concrete, iron, and steel, doesn’t mean we aren’t still standing. You see our gardens? You hear our records? Here we are. Brick. Concrete. Mulberries. Grass. Limestone. Here we are. Park and ride. 

I’m wondering Birmingham, what it is about you that makes me stand on you, feeling so at ease, feeling so alone, feeling like I’m about to escape, and still wanting to go back home?

Thoughts from a Plane: Nature Post #6

Here we are again, Birmingham. But this time I’m so far away. Up on a plane I look for you. It’s a beautiful world from here. Nothing seems to be broken up on United. I just wanted to spend some time thinking about you and the city in ariel view today, thinking about the city as a whole. While on my second flight of the day from Boston back to Pittsburgh I wrote you something:

I am in an innocent place. On a plane. I begin to see waters split the grayish brown land into oval paths. This is when I know I’m home. Pittsburgh. There is desert-colored dust, like limestones in the Mediterranean. It feels like I’m minutes away from vacation, on my way to the ground. I didn’t know I’d miss it. Dark brown hills of dirt pool out of the earth coming further into town, adjacent to dust piles. The houses between the lands neatly planted by God, evenly spaced lawns and hedges. It’s a beautiful world from up here. The highways and waters laid out in the same swivel of threes. I wonder if God plucked and prodded his hands into the thirsty dirt himself, or sent someone on a plane to see what it would look like laid before them. My face is on the plane window. United. Far off to the northwest there are thick white puffs. Too opaque to be clouds. I guess: snow nestled into crevices of mountains. I guess: Laurel Highlands. Apalachia. Everything is peaceful past the rush of wind on the wings. There are no rapids breaking at rocks, from here. No brittle branches breaking off dying trees. Even the sandy-colored bark, dry in between fields of corn rows, doesn’t look helpless. Somehow I am standing in the middle of the sky blowing wind through the bald trees, feeding oxygen into their lungs. Remembering them. Remembering themselves. Evergreens stacked just behind the sinking, bare trees; they are a forest next to a barn next to a highway next to a wheat field next to a terminal, a sign, a bridge, a light, a cone and a flag welcoming us. United. My hands sweep the city. Make love to the open. Make love to the closed. Make love of home, so beautiful from everywhere. 

A Preposition: Nature Post #5

Before the earth was tilled into the urban hills of a city this place had three names. Like the city with three rivers running us through this borough, these hills have a past. This Hill District opens up from one central point on Kirkpatrick street. It splits, and those streets split, and we’re sent into the directions of every end of the city. You can see where you’re going up here. 

Birmingham, you and I, we weren’t here then. But I’ll tell you, the Hill District used to be three parts: Sugartop, Haiti, and Minersville. You see my friend, this Hill District used to be a country, a field, and a cave. The highest part was the tip, like a sweet, severe sugarcane, sticking out of the center of the city. Haiti was a lower, more vulnerable land: its own country in the midst of a city. Minersville, where it all began with the generic name of Farm Number Three, before it became more than dirt patches of earth, sold off acres of land. The city was once many towns. But that was then. 

Now The Hill is of one nation its own, a neighborhood undivided in itself, but so singular it’s own. It’s the heart of itself, the enemy, and the decay. It’s the outside factors imbedded in its soil, and the inside locking hands under the buildings as well. It’s the struggle so deep no one remembers where it came from. Maybe it’s even that no one knows. I’d like to know what happened between Minersville and The Hill District that made it so afraid of itself, that made us so afraid of it. We’re all falling short here, watching our backs. 

Birmingham, do you ever wake up with the gun shots and running teenagers down the Kirkpatrick hill and want to dismantle yourself from the concrete overseeing the Monongahela to steel-walk to the neighborhood and protect the youth from themselves? I do. 

So what do we do now? Is anyone in a position to save another? Why don’t you (please) detach yourself from your middle of the waters, no name part of the city reigns and go? Be a shield. Be a mark in the land. Be a wall high that separates The Hill from itself. I’ll stand with you. 

4th Letter to the Birmingham Bridge: nature post #4

Birmingham Bridge, you have never been your own. James Romanelli named you in 1978. He renamed you. Once, you were the Brady Street Bridge, the South 22nd Bridge the clinical name, connecting Uptown, Oakland, and the Hill District to the South Side at 22nd Street. There was one that came before you.

There was a brother of yours, Birmingham. I feel I can call you just that now. There was Brady Street Bridge right under the nose of the Parkway, right in what now, in 2013 seems like the only open space between Brady Street leading to Second Avenue, leading to Hot Metal, leading to your up-ramp. They demolished him, exploded him. His birth, day unspecified,1896 and death, May 30, 1978. He must have been of fire, he must have, I can tell from the photos, the videos, all the heavy dark smoke, the blackness, the gray city behind it; you must have all been on fire. 

Built from steel truss when no one else still did Pittsburgh made your brother strong, skinny, two-lane, and spider webbed. He wasn’t as thick as you are, as wide as you have become, wasn’t as centrally massive in the middle of the Monongahela. He was, from my view in Uptown, a little further to the right. One South Side block. Do you know how many feet that is, how many yards, how many days--it took for him to disappear? What did it take for Brady to disappear? You were only a baby, Birmingham, but can you tell me anything? Remember your family.

I think about him when I stare into the far off hills of Mount Washington and the Downtown buildings that block the West End view. The water, vast, but somehow outweighed by the buildings, it disappears, doesn’t have an end. I think about how intimate the commute would have been on Brady, how much space I have when I walk, jog, run, drive, bus you and how I want you closer, tighter, so I can feel your veins, like I can almost touch the floss-looking truss and used to hold Brady, a pencil in my hands. I think of him and how I could swing upon him like George the Jungle. I think of how they didn’t want you to be you, but an offspring of a demolished thing. 

3rd Letter to the Birmingham Bridge: nature post #3

Do you catch cold, dear friend? Do you catch anything in your webbed overhead? I look up to you, glinting in the almost sun. The snow has been spared for the first half of the week. Now, Saturday afternoon, it is a stick in your asphalt flooring, slowly the seemingly dead-end cars. The snowed-in traffic makes you seem smaller, today. I am claustrophobic enough traveling you in a car, now surrounded by darkness just before 5pm. With honking cars and slush-snow I am more aware of them than I am of you. What does that make me today, us?

If I could be a cold blooded animal just to swim below you, just once, Oh, I would. I imagine looking up to your underbelly, pasted in a gray-brown pavement. I imagine what I see. Maybe your peaked-top of a bridge will look something like a tower of wings rising up over the flat-bottomed sides of your body. I imagine I would only be able to see the birds that play on the brown Monongahela, but the ones on top disappearing to your top-cover of a sky. I imagine losing and gaining company. Who dwells on and above the bridge will do so, still, as I join the others below. I’d swim and jump, to you, rise and fall under you, reaching, many more times than the sun each day.

But, if I could crawl on my belly, naked in the snow, how close would I be? I’d tunnel-slide the runway, cuddle the rails that keep me from the waters. I’d feel everything as opposed to a non-human numbed nothingness in the cold. I’d slide my skins under the snow, slither into crevices of your cracked concrete grounding. God, what would I be, but maybe an open wound of Mother Earth, then?

Maybe as another type of being I’d acquire more answers than that of geographical and historic information. Maybe I’ll know you intimately, then. I wonder about you, massive being, flung between river and sky. I wonder who you are most times when I wonder who am I.

2nd Letter to the Birmingham Bridge: nature post #2

You were the end result to my journey today. I came at you, this time, straight on from the Hill District, via Centre Avenue. I never get to come down from the hill straight into your divided-highway lanes. I feel like a Queen every once in a while when I do. When I had a car I used to drive by myself at night when I couldn’t sleep. I made sure to go down Centre to Kirkpatrick to you.

I was in the car, navigating for my Minnesotan friend, Alex, short for Alexandra. My red-headed friend is not a firebomb like some may think of red heads, she is a soft spoken one, mid-twenties, with a soft spot for anything that allows her to seep into caring. Today, it was gentrification. “I know where we are. We’re in the Hill District,” she said. Mm, was my only response. Alex sighed. She said something about the ghetto, as a joke, and then changed the subject. I stopped listening as we approached the fast-turning down-slope of the hill on Kirkpatrick. It was still light out, coming down into the early winter afternoon, approaching 3pm.

What happens in Pittsburgh this time of year is that gloominess turns to early evening. Sometimes it only seems to be daylight in this East Coast, almost Midwestern town for the first few hours of dawn.

The clouds weren’t rushing at all. They slow-walked the afternoon over the soft, light green of the bridge: I felt saved. I felt like I was coming down from a place that seemed much darker without the illumination of the bridge. I felt almost as if I was sailing on the Monongahela. The river was huge as I could have an objective look this time, without running, without the chill on my face, closed off from the rest of the affects of the city. The car muzzled the rest of the noise; only my door chattered with the wind. Is this what it’s like when you die and are lifted through the light in the clouds?

I’m not sure why I felt like this: like this was a Christopher Columbus discovery. Much like that one, this bridge was here before me. This town was here before me. Uptown existed and re-existed, as with the bridge. This bridge was built and then reconstructed in the mid 2000’s to include a bike lane and a sign for the bikers to yield to the traffic coming up from Forbes Avenue onto the bridge, sneaking in the shadows from underneath.

This was a moment of trying to put my finger on what I loved about the bridge at that moment, flying across the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Kirkpatrick Street, continuing onto the thick asphalt, car bumping onto the change of physical matter, wheels peddling its 30mph onto the legs of you.

Does it feel the same to you, when any living or non-living thing pounces onto the home of your physical being? My friend, do you feel a thing?  

First Letter to the Bridge: nature post #1

You are not too much more mature than I, Mister Birmingham Bridge. Your thirty-six years connecting neighborhoods to my 22 is only intimidating due to your size. A green steel bridge among the many yellow bridges of Pittsburgh, even in the dark, you are different. Walking about you came about in an organic way. It started with my move to Uptown. I would go and stand at the Parkway ramp on my street and feel the cars whiz by on the concrete, only sometimes stepping over the brown-gray concrete border onto the thin white line separating myself from the traffic. I could see you from there. The AT&T blue and white sign stared at me endlessly from the other side of the bridge, clipping the hills behind it. I had to twist around like a Twizzler to see all that I wanted to see from this point in the city. Yes, the lights were there, but the buildings were not straight on from my view. I’d turn from Downtown towards you and think, how do I get from here, to you?

The first time I travelled your way I went up Seneca, past Forbes, to Fifth. Then Right. I walked straight: past the bus stops to Moultrie, then to Kirkpatrick, the street opposite you. The rainbow-sparkled Welcome to Uptown sign welcomed me to your corner. (I wonder if anyone ever thinks about how deceiving the cheerful design of that sign is to our now almost ghost town of an area.) I stare at the sign for a long time. It didn’t change, neither did I.

I spent some time taking pictures of the skylights on the hills on the way back, but, on the way there I do nothing but stare and switch my head from side to side, neglecting my clumsiness, undistracted by walking in the harsh wind close to the rail of water below. I never noticed your six lanes, always free of heavy traffic, unlike the Parkway, I only noticed some kind of silence, here, in the middle of the city. I stood at the mid-point of you where you meet the Monongahela where I met the chilliest section of your body. Below, to my left, I see your legs hold the top of you where I stand. I could lay down on those almost hidden parts of you, I could fuck in the wind down there. I’d balance the cold, with the screams, and try not to die. I’m sure you have your own horror stories to tell me.

On my way back home that first time with you I saw a ramp coming from the beginning of you. I decided to check it out. Man, I couldn’t believe it. You let me off at Brady and Forbes, just a block and a half from my house. I didn’t need to walk up to the Uptown sign and over to you. I could start under you, near where the Brady Street Bridge used to be, and end up on top of you, on the walkway instead of the bus lane. Still, easily close to a fall into the rivers you separate me from, but a farther distance from the cars. Your heaviness does not scare me, does mine, you?

Until next time, say hello to the stars for me. You are always closer than I.