Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

I’m not sure you would be able to live here in the Tampa Bay area with a fear of bridges…

… my friend Carol believes in one thing,
her fear of bridges. Carol has decided she could never
belong to any of the Dark Age’s religions in which the soul
had to cross a thin, thread-like bridge to find paradise. Fall off
and you’re lost forever. Take Carol across the bay from Tampa
to St. Pete, or across the Cooper River into Charleston,
and you might as well ask her to cut off her arms.
It isn’t the idea of falling or even dying–it’s the bridge itself,
as if it represents the worst kind of modern haunting,
the technological prowess of steel and concrete a living
marvel of torture, atoms exploding beneath those Firestone tires…

Excerpted from Theoretically Speaking, a poem by Rick Mulkey. Rick Mulkey is not from around here, so your are unlikely to find tons of references to Tampa Bay, but you can pick up a collection of his poetry, Toward Any Darkness through Inkwood Books website.

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