I tried to shake the raindrops
out of the tangles in my hair,
but they stuck there
and I scrubbed
too hard,
too fast,
too long,
‘till my skin came off.
That’s all I’ve ever really wanted,
just to be bone.
Feel me now,
I break so easily,
and if you want to,
I’ll let you snap me in half,
just promise to share.

She leaned against the atmosphere
as if she thought it would catch her
when she fell out of
that airplane window,
firmly closing her out of the sky,
too big to sit up in the clouds anymore.
So she plummets
through rain that failed to remember
its way to the ground
and prayers whom got lost
on their way to Heaven,
unafraid to look down,
knowing that’s where they came from.

She was a raindrop,
tipping the leaf over to the
blades of grass below,
the word that made the sentence
too long for the line,
the grain of sand
picked out of the cement
on my driveway
where I lay waiting,
listening for the footsteps
of someone coming to save me.
Take me out of this
suburban neighborhood cage
and teach me to breathe in
the smoke from factories
that process dreams.

But now, I am grey,
clothed with smog
from the big machine’s tobacco pipes,
blowing indispensable wishes
along my ear canals,
billowing the sails,
craving to land someplace new.

(I would love to feel what it’s like
to be anywhere but here.)

Possibly, somewhere bright,
somewhere warm.
I am exhausted from all the monotone colors.
Coats and scarves are suffocating,
mittens won’t let me
keep hanging onto the address label
on the side of the mailbox,
insisting I am not just a letter,
not an envelope to be sent to my fantasies,
ripped open and found in the words
mailed to the gods,
twisting and turning,
bleaching out the clouds,
dirty now and thrown away.
(How do you think
they got so white?)

She spills down next to me,
splattering into daydreams,
leading a crusade of reality
and leaving no room
for the weeds to grow
in the cracks decorating the driveway.
They were pulled up
at the end of summer,
left to decompose at the bottom
of the wastepaper basket
along with the words
that never reached the sky
to keeping the rain from falling.

And she was falling too.
Maybe,
I could have saved her.

-Kori Stone
finished: 02.07.06