Feel free to share your poem here….or send us an email: pdxbridgefestival@gmail.com.
Thanks!
–The PDXBF Team

During a recent visit with local family I happened upon your calendar that was displayed prominently in their kitchen. I was immediately drawn to it and found myself captivated by every month’s display.

I am an artist. Last year I created a number of watercolor paintings of Portland bridges that have yet to be seen. I painted them in my self-developed style. I would appreciate the opportunity to be considered for your next calendar. Please feel free to access my art pieces at the following website.

http://johncantrall.com

Warm regards,
John Cantrall

So I wrote a blog post about it and published a few photos. Please check out – http://wayday.blogspot.com/2010/08/hawthorn-bridge-adrift-in-time.html

Thanks for throwing a great festival!

Happy 100 Hawthorn Bridge!!

At the start of my bridge obsession, I was still trying to figure out which bridge was which. I thought the Hawthorne Bridge was the Steel Bridge (an excusable mistake; they have lots in common), and later I mistook the Hawthorne Bridge for the Morrison Bridge. I asked my grandfather to take me across the Morrison Bridge. I thought I was going on the Hawthorne Bridge, but to my surprise, the bridge I wanted to be on was the next one up the river!

Now I know which bridge is which, and I’ve found out more I never even knew about ten years ago.

I LIE ON THE BED

Your arms bridge over me
a frame the photograph
of my body is taken through:
the still water of her running.

The first summer I was trapped,
I froze,
a deer caught
in a cruiser’s headlights.

When you lean down to kiss me
what am I do ?
Not turn my vulnerable neck,
but leap—

knowing the current
will hold me.
At last, I may
allow you.

AFTERWARDS THE PARTY MUST BE CANCELLED

At 13, admittedly, a week before my 14th birthday,
but still, 13, I swallow the small pill without water
and sail from Ellen’s home to mine, the trees changing shape
and the road a constantly cresting wave.
Lost hours, shut down, no mind, I come to, see our furniture, in place
but no longer truly ours. Run downstairs, check the artificial kitchen cupboards full of duplicates, the heavy mixing bowls, boxes of Jell-O pudding, butterscotch, because they knew I’d always favored it. Dishwasher back
in its corner on the exact angle I’d left it. The lights above the eating
nook illuminate identical empty space. Take the stairs up,
my doe legs stretching like a bridge to the old life.
What do they want with me? What do I offer? Wake my mother and
smell her. She smells like my mother, her hair thin under my fingertips, but
not my mother, an alien substitute. I have been taken and cannot return.
My toothbrush in its cup, still wet from making bedtime appear normal. Shake my brother, he seems my brother, his Howdy Dowdy ears. But my brother
lives on earth, while I am doomed for here. The closet full of my clothes, transported to coax compliance. I know what will penetrate. Pain.
Pain is real. Jab pencils in my arm. Mother chokes “what’s the matter with her?” Andy pulls the vodka bottle from beneath his bed and says, “she must’ve
gotten into this.” Where is Ellen this whole time? Days later Lisa
tolls the terrible news which chases me until marriage—I’d touched Ellen,
pulling on the straps of her bra, saying, “don’t be afraid of your homosexuality—“ Race naked down the middle of Stoneway Lane, screaming.
“No! Acid” between clenched teeth. “What?” my mother gasps,
“What’s that?” “L!S!D!” like a cheer. At the raised window, my mother and brother a heavy chain pulling on me desperately from behind. Dr Weinstein administers a needle in my upper arm. Black sky, stars, dash for the intersection of what can bring me back. The roaring hum of traffic on City Line Avenue,
even at 3 a.m. cars stream from the suburbs into the pulse of congregation. Terribly deep, dark sleep, awaken to my mother’s tear streaked face awakening in a chair beside my bed, sun pours through the nailed down window. Feel the solidness of my limbs, the soreness of the body which has, again, submitted and not failed to prove the unbreakable connection.

Betsy Fogelman Tighe

Walking Away From the Poem

I have it. I know just what will bridge the inside to the out,
the auto to the bio, a subject both historical and personal,

when I get up to make a cup of tea and while I wait
for the water to boil, begin in my house staged to sell

to put away the Christmas disorder, ornaments dangling
from the antler chandelier, apples on a wire tree,

and that bit of engagement with my things, my beautiful
whittled down things, collected on trips and from the dead

leads me from room to room in a helix of activity. I empty
drawers, swap tschotckes, stack towels, until I return to my desk

to write the destined to be canonical poem and find it fled,
the runaway child in rubber boots, defiant about the same dish again.

A Buddhist would have me call this poem, like all my losses
“thinking” “passing memory,” and if I wish to rest in the essence

I will, as I have with the mother who gave me the crystal bowl,
and the brother whose pen I hold, and the husband whose children I kept,

just let it go, let it go, and instead, write the poem of this moment,
the one in which I open the door to my resplendent and transparent house,

and invite You, the next tenant, neat and cordial,
waiting on the portal, to come, promptly, unswervingly, in.

Betsy Fogelman Tighe

Thanks Sharon, for showing interest!

c Betsy Fogelman Tighe

While Hiking the Marquim trail

I find a tree
whose roots
had given out;
now just a log
spanning
a narrow creek.
I part my arms
like a tight-rope walker
and balance
my way across.

I remember
taking my first
tenuous steps
across
the Hawthorne.
Watching the river
below
through the thin
metal slates
of the bridge.
The water
whispered to me;
telling me
the summer could
be cool again
if only
I would just give in
to its overwhelming
embrace.

I created a short documentary on a Hawthorne Bridge operator. It’s called Lift and it documents the struggles of Matt Craft to find a balance between loneliness and solitude. It will screen on August 5th as part of the Bridge Festival.

If you have a Bridge film (metaphorical or physical bridge) please submit to the festival at http://www.pdxbridgefestival.org/submit by June 21st.