A Little Slice of Heaven
"And it'd make sense for the thing you feel least in the afterlife to be the thing you felt mostin the current life, though you'd have to admit if there's an afterlife, it'd mean this lifeis reckoning for a prior execution, which means this shit show might be the penance we deserve,"she said, which seemed an odd stab at small talk, even for a madcap pediatrician,but—Alakazam!—she pronounced the baby perfectlyhealthy and ordered him a round of shots before redeploying us to another six-month stintin the wild. But that thing she said really stuck with me, sitting beside you the whole bus ride home and laterfeeding the toddler a bowlful of consolidated peas and carrots and beside you in bed until morning,and the days peeled away like that, like platitudes from a quote-a-day calendar, like rounds of a deli loafoff a slicer, like cross sections of the cortex cut clean by an MRI, and it really stuck in my head,that thing she said, and it probably always will until I acquit myself of the grist of this life and submitto the next one, where I may never feel again as I do beside you tonight, sopping upbouillabaisse, my serious love, with the soft guts of a baguette on a Friday in a lifeI must've qualified for and justly received, I know not the hokey jurisprudence of why.
Feature Date
- April 1, 2022
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Copyright © 2021 by Jaswinder Bolina.
(The Gettysburg Review)
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jaswinder Bolina is the author of the full-length poetry collections The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), and of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His debut collection of essays, Of Color, was released by McSweeney’s in 2020.
Vol. 33 / No. 4
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Gettysburg College
Editor
Mark Drew
Managing Editor
Lauren Hohle
Founding Editor
Peter Stitt
The Gettysburg Review, published by Gettysburg College, is recognized as one of the country’s premier literary journals. Since its debut in 1988, work by such luminaries as E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, James Tate, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall has appeared alongside that of emerging artists such as Christopher Coake, Holly Goddard Jones, Kyle Minor, Ginger Strand, and Charles Yu.
More than one-hundred short stories, poems, and essays first published in The Gettysburg Review have been reprinted in the various prize anthologies—The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, The Best American Poetry, Essays, Mystery Stories, and Short Stories, New Stories from the South, as well as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards—or have reappeared in such esteemed publications as Harper’s. In addition, The Gettysburg Review’s editing, elegant design, and stunning graphics have earned numerous prizes, including a Best New Journal award and four Best Journal Design awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, and a PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing.
We invite you to share in and support our endeavor by submitting to, reading, and, most importantly, subscribing to The Gettysburg Review. With its award-winning editing, writing, and design, The Gettysburg Review is, as one reader put it, “Pure delight, every time.”
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
