Suicide

Julie rings her hands and redials.
The police have come and they are standing in her hallway.
She stares at their feet because it is something to focus on,
large black shoes like planks.

She feels the weight of the keys in her hand.
She tells them she doesn’t understand how this happened.

Later, she says she wishes there was something she could have done.
Something she could have said
to this man that lies dead in the alleyway of her building.

And I wonder why someone would choose here.
Why not take the last of your money to San Francisco
and leap off the Golden Gate.
Or at least the Brooklyn Bridge. A swandive.
A bottle of pills and an endless dream in their own bed.
Something a little more beautiful than an alleyway in Brooklyn.

Julie thinks she might be cursed. What do I do, she asks.
How can this happen, she wonders.

And I think this kind of thing happens everywhere all the time.
People don’t wake up into tomorrow
We have all left someone behind.

The dial has turned on their life
and now, in a different way, on Julie’s.

She tells me the police were nice. Professional,
which I suppose is a good thing.

They take the man away.
No one knows him. He didn’t live here.
He’s was just a man.

That night Julie won’t sleep. She will think of him.
The way he looked when she saw him. There was no blood
He was just a twisted crippled thing, a sack of meat and bones.
Not like a man at all. Not like the man lying next to her, who breathes steady.

Later, that thought will help her sleep. He was not like a man at all.
This was no one’s fault, she tells herself.
He was already dead before he hit the ground.