A History of Grief, by Tom Darin Liskey

A History of Grief

There were nights

I couldn’t sleep

After you died.

The cancer 

That stole our father

Took you as well.

In Geneva

Your ghost came

Back to me

In a rush of memories

The coma.

The hospital bed.

The brass crucifix on the wall.

The cancer growing

Your broken body.

Grief turned

My eyelids

Inside out

Like celluloid;

Flayed my heart open

Like a dumb animal.

So, I dreamed awake

Like ghosts do

Walking the narrow

Night streets of Carouge

Past alleyways

Where Arab boys

Sold hashish,

My feet moving

Always forward

To a clock

Without hands

Every muscle

Yearning for exhaustion

Something to bring rest,

But none ever came.

I became a stranger to myself

Hating the reflection

I saw in darkened shop windows—

The ghost of a drowned man

Floating on black water.

An image that only you would understand,

My sister.

Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. His fiction and non fiction have appeared in the Crime Factory, and Driftwood Press. His photographs have been published in Hobo Camp Review, Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, Synesthesia Literary Journal and Midwestern Gothic.