“The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.”
– Charles Simic

I too
would be a stone
if only I could
harden myself
enough I would
fit myself to
the palm of a boy
with bottles to break
or be kicked along
the curb by a sad
teenaged girl.
I would delight
in being skimmed
across the surface
of a pond happy
to then sink
silent past astonished
fishes if only
I could lose these
edges and take on
the weight.

Gregory Luce is the author of the chapbooks Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications) and Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Innisfree Poetry Review, If, Northern Virginia Review, Juke Jar, Praxilla, Buffalo Creek Review, and in the anthology Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press). He lives in Washington, D.C. where he works as Production Specialist for the National Geographic Society.

I Too Would be a Stone by Gregory Luce (c) Copyright Gregory Luce; printed by permission of the author.