Dear Sylvia: The Bridge
by Joanna Grant
Sylvia, I want to tell you
that I’m standing on a bridge
over the Seine like you did
all those years ago
I can smell woodsmoke
even here in the city
and across the bridge
there is a garden
and in that garden
there are lovers and
they’ve started putting
their love locks back
on the railings of this bridge—
all kinds of locks—combination,
lock and key, all sorts of locks,
even though that one bridge
so famous for its locks collapsed
into grey river water under the weight
it could no longer take—and Sylvia,
we didn’t fare much better in love,
did we, but on a day like today
on a bridge just like this one
we can see, can’t we, how it all might
have worked out and how it almost did
Joanna Grant holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.
