Portrait

She sat alone on the grey-yellow railing,

Her face turned away

As she stared out at the rainy dawn

Humming quietly to herself

Tunelessly,

Between drags.

Her left hand hung lifelessly at her side

Only moving to raise the half-empty beer bottle to her lips

And still she wouldn’t look at me.

Her blue jean cutoffs

And the simple, baggy white tank she had worn

Since the day Asha died

Were dirty and splattered with raindrops.

Her dark hair was shaggy and short,

Streaked with old red dye

That had since darkened into copper.

I was grateful that I could not see her eyes;

The sky does not weep only in clichés.

And she would sit there,

Singing her sadness to the incessant rain

Swinging her wretched bottle

Breathing smoke into the saturated air,

And mourning the loss of her best friend.

They did everything together,

Before the cracked and peeling wooden railing

And the beer bottle.

Back before the fainting spells,

The morning sickness, the swollen belly

The screaming

And the two shallow graves, one so terribly tiny

That the stone still overshadows it.

Standing there by that railing

I was so horribly glad I could not see her eyes

So terribly certain that if she turned to me then

I might die from what she was living.

Her pale white skin was scarred with hesitations,

Her shoulders hunched and broken,

And I could only imagine her distant, unseeing gaze

As she locked herself away.

Standing there, watching her

The hollow, rattling wind against my face

Like a caged and dying soul –

I’ve held that image in my mind

A warped and distorted still life,

A portrait of despair.

Life and a Cigarette, I’d call it

And I’d hang it out for the world to see

And then maybe someone would notice

Her own sister, daughter, friend, dying

And maybe there would be just a chance at hope

And I would know that girl on the railing,

That girl with the dead song and the empty bottle

That girl had a purpose.

And then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much.