The Afterlife

Donna Steiner

image credit: Donna Steiner

When music stops, there’s a moment as the last note travels to the listener’s ear. Almost like echo, but pre-echo, wholly itself. In Tucson the cat dozed in the sun, logy as a lush, then clapped down on a gecko’s tail; the tail disarticulated as the gecko scrambled off. A severed tail flails like a tiny drunkard; its thrashing pre-occupies the predator, enabling escape, like a rodeo clown, part hazard, part magic.

Imagine if, encountering a hostile stranger, we could leave an arm behind. The stranger grasping a shoulder, an elbow, a nerve-hot limb that fights back, leaves the guy gasping by the roadside.

Every day we witness the inexplicable, the irreconcilable; our lives pass inarticulately if we allow, but for now I say peek into the collapsed gourd, token of another missed holiday: a slick of light cathedralizes its insides. That bone over my eye, the one whose name I can never recall, looks different from when you saw me, my hands are different, my skin… We feel the toll, we do, but shhhhh, listen… The afterlife of sound lands in the bones of our ears; ears are cathedrals, our lungs cathedrals, the distance between there and here, cathedral. Things taken from us sometimes return like a gratuity, like echo, like long tail of incense, almost animate, part magic, part terror, holy ourselves.

Donna Steiner’s writing has been published in literary journals including The Sun, Fourth River, Radar Poetry, Under the Gum Tree, Brevity, and Stone Canoe. She teaches at the State University of New York. A chapbook, Lost and Found in Ocean County, New Jersey, is forthcoming from Tolsun Books. Another chapbook, Elements, was released by Sweet Publications. @Steiner.donna