Sometimes People Fall Out of Windows

I get tired of telling the story, of explaining
how it wasn’t an attempt, how I wasn’t drunk

just under the influence of my own drowsy
clumsiness. Sometimes people fall

out of second story windows. I know how
crazy that sounds but it just is what it is and it is

exhausting having to explain what might be divine
intervention. I didn’t choose for my ankle

to now feel when the climate changes and if I were trying
to fall from the window back then I’m sure I would have hurt

more than just that. I don’t think it’s that hard to believe
that I don’t understand how it happened but if it were more

than an accident I wouldn’t have dragged myself
to another building and up four more flights

of stairs to get my phone, calling for an ambulance.
Maybe it was a test to see how badly I wanted this

gift of life, or maybe I am just that clumsy
when my walking becomes less motor skills, more

sleeping at the wheel. All I know is I had seen a homeless
man I helped once at the gas station

yesterday and he told me he saved
all of the money people had ever given him and now

he was finally able to buy a townhouse. I know
doctors told us my nephew had a bad kidney at birth

and he wasn’t going to live past one year, but here
we are, eleven years later and the kid is still

kicking perfectly fine. I can’t determine the difference
between what you would call a sign and what I would but I can
tell you that I’ve lost enough fights
with gravity to know that night something helped me survive. Now quit

asking me to lay out to you how it happened
like it’s a drunken party trick.









Deonte Osayande is writer from Detroit, Mi. His poems have been published in over a dozen literary journals. He is a two time member of the Detroit National Poetry Slam Team and a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal and Scissors and Spackle. He also teaches creative writing through the Inside Out Detroit program and is a Professor of English at Wayne County Community College. He spends his time fighting narcolepsy, and often losing.

See another poem by Osayande in Issue 3.1