Burning Bridges

The Brooklyn Bridge is burning. Mother is at work, the leaves are browning and waltzing to the ground, children are walking in single-file lines, Dylan is holding his chest and laughing, but the bridge is burning, and we are all swallowing ash. I didn't know what it meant to see the flames from Avenue B. I thought of how I could've started it, did I leave a cigarette burning on my way to the deli? Did a plane crash through it? Should I have tried to shoot it down? The soot tastes sour on my tongue, the pieces of the bridge, in them I can taste the lovers who kissed there, all of their footprints are tired and sleeping in my nostrils. There is a stench, of loss maybe, of fear. There are journalists standing around the bridge in gas masks, but none of them are stepping into the flames. "It is too hard to contain," he says under his breath. Brooklyn and Manhattan are fighting over whose responsibility it is to call for engines and water hoses. No one wants to be the first to try. A boat caught fire for a few minutes, and traveled into the mouth of the river. The children are excited by it. A few of them are in their mittens, roasting marshmallows with scrap metal. "The Brooklyn Bridge is burning," someone says to their sister. And the sun still heats the concrete in the mornings, people comb their hair in traffic, seagulls circle the skyline, and everyone finds a different way to work.