A good bridge is akin to flight, 
and in the minutes and miles it takes
to bridge Lake Pontchartrain,
we enter into a different state of motion,
like the parabolic paths of baseball stitches 

in between the bat and glove. This is the beginning
of the end — we have only months, just summer,
to cement the routine life we’ve built, only minutes
before our roadway touches ground again, till reality 
regains its footing. But flight has its own time logic

and dreams always require border-crossing;
a step into the circle, then a step back out.
Whitney Houston’s high note that she holds 
pure until she’s out of breath. I know
I’ve said all this before, but only in our skyward

breathless letting go can we hold moments. 
The way we stop here, in the movement
between places, mid-arc arrows, is the only time
we truly stop. And our lives will only pause here
long enough for our electronic smoke to dissipate.

Published March 6, 2022

Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Originally from New Mexico, they are currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2022 Djanikian Scholars Semifinalist and a 32 Poems Featured Emerging Poet, and their most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Banshee, Stone Quarterly, River Heron Review, Adroit, Belfield Literary Review, and Icarus. You can also find them on Twitter (@gustav_parker) and Instagram (@gustavparker).

Michelle Jezierski is an artist born and based in Berlin. She received her graduate and post graduate degrees from Universität der Künste Berlin. In 2005, Jezierski received the NICA-Scholarship and spent a semester at Cooper Union New York. She has studied under Tony Cragg and Valérie Favre. Recently, Jezierski’s work has been exhibited in Dusseldorf at Kunst & Denker Contemporary and in Landshut at Galerie Jahn. You can see more of her work on her website, here.