Poetry by Juliet Waller
Falling
Listen to Juliet reading her poem:
We’re on the roof when you set your coffee down. I think of it falling. And I consider the first person to drop a penny off the Empire State Building and how that penny landed on the sidewalk and rolled into a gutter but the next person to drop a penny killed a man when it landed on his head.
What is luck and what is bad luck?
I don’t always think of death when I'm falling in love. But I do think of luck and the tenuous ground it lays.
The elevator operator at the Empire State Building once let my son push the lever, giving a six-year-old control of propelling us downward.
Delight.
In 1945 a plane flew into the Empire State Building.
Fog.
The force caused an elevator operator named Betty Lou to be thrown from her elevator. She broke many bones.
Bad luck.
Paramedics put her on a stretcher, put the stretcher on a different elevator. That elevator fell many floors.
Worse Luck.
She fell so many floors and survived.
Luck.
She fell so many floors and survived that she made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Delight.
I am delighted and I feel lucky and I’m afraid of the fog.
Juliet Waller is a Seattle based writer and playwriting teacher. Her pieces have appeared in, among others, Third Street Review, 3Elements, New Delta Review, and Does It Have Pockets. She has an upcoming piece in Pixie Literary Magazine.