Poetry

Afterlives

Only faces in little boxes now; blinking and peering
into a starless space, not knowing what to do –

except perhaps, wave. Our host asks each box:
What’s new with you? We talk, in turns.

We share the virtual part – meaning
the essence. It’s lovely. How this half-body

huddle forces us to talk; how we conform,
like grafted stalks, to a new light source.

Dante insists our afterlives will be the now eternal.
I study my husband’s framed face unselfconsciously.

No one can see me gazing at our years.
My sons, I see, have become men whose eyes

are equable and clear. Time lapses freeze, in pixel images,
expressions like true selves they made as toddlers.

On TV, the Pope delivers the Mass to empty seats.
How alone he looks – in spite of the live stream.

No pilgrims, no Vatican City festooned with flowers;
only police to hold the barricades. And yet, the numbers say,

more watched and listened to the liturgy than ever
attended. On sofas that sag, on laptops, in drive-thru caravans

for bread and wine. An insistence on right seasons if only to prove
we are different from our dogs. We hear a whistle too.

M.B. McLatchey

M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State Univ. Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of a recently-completed educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing (2021). M.B. is the recipient of several literary awards, including the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal and the Annie Finch Prize from the National Poetry Review. Currently Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, she is Associate Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

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