“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.
A Little Slice of Heaven
Feature Date
- April 1, 2022
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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
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Lauren Hohle
Founding Editor
Peter Stitt
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