Checking In

It's Friday. I imagine that means something to lots of folks. It's just another day to me.
Anyway, Omen is this week's poem. It's about the aura of foreboding I felt the morning of my near-drowning.

Have a weekend.

Obligatorily,

Cindy

Omen

It should have been
like other mornings.
Even five-year-olds are set
in their ways and know when
something isn’t right.

And something wasn’t right.

A chill like black chrome
killed comfort in the routine
of breakfast then cartoons.
A pall occluded bright blue eyes, and
here was dread, an unkind promise—
a sickening portent of proximate danger.
This was my home all other mornings.

Now, it was my Gethsemane.

Mom, I don’t want
to go to school today.
Lingering and lingering and stalling and
digging my heels into the safe side of
the threshold, until Mom took my hand
and offered me to the world—
a thing as hungry and wild as
any wooded beast.

It’s going to be a bad day.

Uneventful hours passed, and
panic pressed into crayoned canvas.
Halfway home, fully present and
razor blade lucid, I hoofed across
to the loden-faced marsh.
And, quite comfortable in my
wide-awake oblivion, I marched
right into a muddy abyss
with no memory of the warning.