Waking Up Worried
By C. Tompkins

Minute hands bent & withered
fly corpses face up
on the window sill––

The buzz & twitch
of one fading survivor
turns me over

Legs kicking with the mimicking fly.
My sister sweeps the tiny graveyard
drying in orange August sun

And their stiff thread-curled legs
are my father’s––our father’s––
rolling in his bed, sheetless

Grasping for something
above him
that none of us could see.

He called us by wrong names
Malachi & Scheherazade
Flat on his back without a pillow.

I laid my head to his chest
and felt humming
his soundless thoughts

Through a worn, cotton T-shirt.
His bedroom so dark
I tore down the blinds.

Light cut
through the room
igniting his face.

He swallowed it
poisoned and turned over
for the first time

Revealing the ivy
ensnaring his spine
like hastily braided hair––

Nine wooden clocks on the walls
All hands removed
except the second, still ticking.

And on the sill, of course:
two morbid flies
sleeping on their wings.

Prose artist Curtis Tompkins lives and writes in the Allegheny Highlands of western Maryland.  His prose, poetry, and reviews have appeared most recently in The Broadkill Review, Review Revue, and Backbone Mountain Review.  He is also editor for three online magazines for an independent New York publisher, including a magazine dedicated to emerging and established authors (americanfiction.org).

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