9:20p(ost)m(ortem)
by Daniel Korunka
your eyes are glazed over, a clay sculpture
just out of the Kiln or sullied
with silt stirred up from
the bottom of a creek.
i wonder quietly how long it’s been
since you’ve seen anything, but now
my own eyes jump between two things:
Hands, paper-thin and mottled purple and
already cold
(the house had always been chilly, right?)
with bones, weary creatures,
just surfacing the ocean of your skin
and
the unsteady rise and fall of the
roman empire of your Lungs
after oxygen is gone and you’re
drowning, suffocating, under the
pressure of sixty years.
you fall one last time and
I freeze with you, waiting while
centuries decades days seconds
scream by as the nurse swims around
in the warm stickiness that suddenly
flooded the room.
a quiet whisper of “9:20” grazes my cheek,
a bullet that snaps me back to the present
and now everyone’s in motion
(we’re all cogs in a broken machine).
i slip outside behind my brother and
i’m already haunted by ghosts
(gone gone gone)
and i search a solid sky for something,
your pulse still thrumming
in my veins, an electric current,
but the clouds are ungiving, unforgiving.