Afterlife by James Allen Hall

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend March 13, 2017   Afterlife   James Allen Hall

We're not from here. We don't aria, we warble.  We wore suits to get here, rumpled by the hot car ride.  Pumped our own gas. In Heaven two days,   still the custom shirtlessness offends.  Like it's the g-d French Rivera. (You say it yours.  We'll say it the right way.)  Nor do we au revoir. We eat without speaking, hunched over   our plates at the picnic tables. We prefer paper.  It's not we're unfriendly, but its our particular God Almighty we won't give up. First Sunday here,   and we're missing Shirl and Jesse, who started smoking again. Clove cigarettes, of all things. What Heaven don't stock Reds soft packs?    Then Tony stopped stopping by, on account he works overnights at the baby factory, low on the totem: cranial deformities.    Well it's a job. It's enough to crack your heart.    We stay up drinking slurpee-and-rums outside the Kum & Go. Who knows how long them hot dogs have roasted on the carriage, under the eternal heat lamp.    Everything here is an effigy to hunger. Time moves not at all when all the clocks are confiscated. I am terrified I will begin to speak in the first person about pleasure.    Stop wearing underwear to our "To Hell with Heaven" meetings. They give us new names, say forget Louisville.  This here's all the village you need. We lose every day   more folks to Heaven's gen pop. We left the earth but the memory turns us over in its hot light.  The Chief Risk Cherubim say unlearn the love of gravity   and then the earth can leave us back. Psychobabble mumbo jumble. We dream of opening a garage but ain't bum starters nor oil changes no more. The technology outlived us.    There's a choice to be made between the past, the present tense. We are failure-angels, plain and redneck, we're going to fall down to the earth   we can't stop loving, find our families and touch their faces angrily. But first we will edge with pink and yellow peonies our graves, our graves   which remind our deaths daily: redeem us.            Copyright © 2017 James Allen Hall. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "Ever since my father died in June 2015, I can't stop thinking about his experience of the afterlife. The poem approximates speech and thought of folks I know in southeastern Indiana. Ever since November 2016, I can't stop thinking about their experience of the afterlife we're living in as well." —James Allen Hall   James Allen Hall is the author of I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well: Essays (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2017) and Now You're the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008). He teaches at Washington College and divides his time between Chestertown and Baltimore, Maryland.     Poetry by Hall   Now You're the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008)  "Cachexia" by Max Ritvo "The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara "Knoxville, Tennessee" by Nikki Giovanni Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. If you enjoy Poem-a-Day, please consider making a donation to help make it possible. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038