I-10 High Rise Bridge

They could have built 
anything.
They built me:
one hundred and fourteen feet high
six lanes of concrete and rebar
soaring over the Industrial Canal
as natural as a donkey in a lab coat.

From my peak you can see 
everything.
The skyline of 
the world’s northernmost banana republic.
The Superdome.
The river, whose tranquil permanence
fills me with envy.
A quilt of flapping blue tarps
and subsidized solar panels.

A baby or two has entered the world 
while passing across me. Birds 
have long enjoyed nesting in my girders
and there are some tough fucking turtles 
in that canal.
But I’ve seen more death 
than anything else.

I tasted blood for the first time
on December 17th, 1966.
A truckload of drunk fishermen
about to miss the Downman Road exit
sideswiped a sedan
carrying a mother and two children.
I drank them all up 
like a six-pack of Dixie.

I bore witness 
as they strategically distributed 
the consequences of their actions
among the least of themselves.
I watched fertilizer runoff 
thicken the Gulf 
into a turbid bowl of gumbo
saw the Gulf eat
into the coastline 
like termites
turning their maps into lies.
I watched the Army Corps of Engineers
throw together some slapdash bullshit
and call it a levee,
knowing exactly which neighborhoods
would be decimated when it failed.
I saw those flood walls crumble 
when Katrina whaled into them.

Six days later 
I watched
still as the September sun
while seven New Orleans Police Department officers 
drove up the Danzinger Bridge
in an unmarked box truck
armed with AK-47s
as honorable as pirates
as civil as coyotes.

I saw them jump out in street clothes
to face 
their neighbors.
Their neighbors 
who had been abandoned to drown
abandoned by a nation
that was happy to use their bodies
for war
for wage labor
for imprisonment
now looking for lost family members
looking for food
looking for water.

They murdered James Brissette
a seventeen year-old boy.
They murdered Ronald Madison
a forty year-old developmentally disabled man.
They shot him in the back.
All seven of those officers are walking free.
Ronald and James are still dead.

Things are winding down.
They’ve stopped the music 
and turned the lights up in America. 
After sixty years
of watching them 
speed distractedly through 
the miracles that surround them
I have no expectation of care
no illusions of longevity. 

They could have built 
anything.
They inherited
all the accumulated wealth
of creation
thirteen billion years
of the sun’s blessings
and they decided 
to set it on fire.
They invented Keurig cups.
They invented ghost fishing.
They fed it to leaf blowers.
They sprayed it out of riverboat-mounted flamethrowers.
They turned all that promise
into trash
and noise 
and wind
and death.

They could have built 
anything.
They chose this.