Every Poet Has A Love Affair With A Bridge
Titled after a line from “Letter to a Young Poet” by Megan Fernandes
I will not cut myself off from the world.
For months after I built the courage to leave, I threw
my shoulder into the cold walls of memory
in the hope that breaking through would be the same
as understanding. I drove across the Rickenbacker Causeway
at night, back and forth from Key Biscayne, just to pass
over the highest standing point in Miami. Eddie once said
a landfill repurposed into a park was the highest point—
he was wrong technically, but he was right to make a story
out of discard. I made a story of everything. How in the afternoons
the banyan trees that broke my heart were also breaking:
spindled roots dropping from the branches, reaching for dirt
to form a new trunk. That my mango tree blossoms turning brown
and dying were some extension of my pain, as if loss
could radiate into every living thing remaining
and it can. It did. Chunks of my hair
fell on the tile floor. I sat in a chair in front of my students
instead of pacing, spoke more softly, saw the boy crying
in the back row that I didn’t before. I avoided my room
except to sleep, when I could sleep, learned the name
of every closing employee at the café down the street.
After all that pain, I wanted to be the type of person who laughs
at the wind. I wanted to spit in the dirt and not understand
the entire order of its molecules changed when mixed
with my saliva, particles rushing apart, how easy solidity
can be splintered by a thoughtless act. I wanted irony to be a shield
for unbearable hurt. Driving over the causeway so many times
I knew exactly when I’d reach the highest point, seeing
the men cast their fishing rods into the bay
over and over, so often with nothing to show, breathing
still, loving still, shattering like a river at the mouth
of the ocean, I decided, I will not cut myself off from the world.
I will throw myself against every wall, so hard, that when
I cannot break through, I break open.
Jarrett Moseley is a bisexual poet living in Miami. He is the author of the chapbook Gratitude List (Bull City Press, 2024). His manuscript, Rehumanization Litany, was a finalist for the 2026 Jake Adam York Prize, and chosen by Major Jackson as an honorable mention for the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. Winner of the North American Review's 2026 James Hearst Poetry Prize selected by Danez Smith, his poems have also won awards from the Baltimore Review and The Academy of American Poets. Individual poems have been published Ploughshares, AGNI, and elsewhere.