‘Things Work Out for the Best Sometimes’

Photographer Antoine Liu, born in 2006, is a free campus poet, painter and composer, as well as an undergraduate student in University of International Business and Economics, in Beijing.

Things Work Out for the Best Sometimes

I wonder if I can ever crack the brûlée
of train schedules and tracks—sideways
like a wild car racing toward the train's clanging
and whooshing, crashing through it like steel through glass.
Thus, I transition myself from logic to play,
but with a lingering responsibility to tell a story:
My car lands on a basketball court
where a gang has just popped the basketball.
Just as the sound of the popping ball reaches the ears
of the boys and girls there practicing for the city finals,
a sinkhole drops the gang down six floors.
The good kids throw them another ball—ha ha...
Their instant-karma meme spreads to every phone
in the world, and the girl who shot the video
reunites with her estranged father,
a fireman who was among the first responders
to climb down into the sinkhole to aid the injured:
a few broken legs and my trashed Subaru,
graffitied by the gang the next day.
The gang ended up the sympathetic party,
and this is the story of how seven boys,
now known as the Sinkhole Gang, became
famous drinkers at the fireman's bar,
the Tender Trap, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
where the meme girl now works beside her father.
She married one of the gang members,
named Dylan—they have twins
with another on the way.

Lawrence Bridges' poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). He lives in Los Angeles. You can find him on IG: @larrybridges