Stillborn 1907, by Gary P English

Woman Jumping, Genesee Hotel, photography by I. Russell Sorgi (USA) 1942

​Stillborn 1907
 
I met you only once:
in September ’42
at Buffalo’s Genesee Hotel,
where rooms were a dollar.
A dime could buy coffee
in the diner downstairs.
Thirty-five summers brought you there,
through Depression, divorce,
       nine months of war.
 
Your bleached rumpled hair rippled
in the 30-mile wind.
Your right arm, flimsy paperweight,
fought to restrain your blue cotton dress
from slapping your face,
your mask of determined          terror.
Your legs, unstable enablers, shuddered
outside the window of your eighth-floor room.
Your left hand fluttered –
       a quiver
of your despondent intentions.
 
No words could
dissuade the step.
That fall, you fell your eighty feet:
No explanation
       for the erasure of your existence.
 
There’s a photographer in Albany
who still can’t believe he shot that frame,
ten feet above your death.
 
Gary P English
 
Gary P English (they/them/their) lives in Baton Rouge, LA, where they and their partner share a home with a dachshund and two cats. Besides writing, they paint and play the guitar. Their poems have been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Home Planet News, and Stonecoast Review.