This clock has no numbers by Francine Witte
It also has no hands. And no digital flip. It does have a face, but it’s your face, going plaid with wrinkles, your dry lip toast. Before you know it, your time will be up, all your tick-tock silenced. Before you know it, no one is looking at your face, not for answers, not for anything. The air right in front of your nose is no longer perfumed with mystery, no longer smelling sweet like it once used to do, you will stop asking it to. You will simply slow down to a hum.
Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) was published by ELJ Editions in September, 2021. She lives in NYC.