The Afterlife
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Afterlife
The unlucky dead, caught still in the burning net of transience, would hardly know what to make of themselves or their afterlives in our minds. As if heaven and hell were fruit of idle afternoons or gossip column headlines—conspiracy theorists kneeling on the grassy knoll, drawing pentagrams with one point at ground zero, one at the Lorraine Motel—as if limbo were the mouth of a chain-smoking matron who a generation past cast in plaster the gleaming, just-licked penis of a doomed guitar god, and who now sits, grey hair gleaming, holding court in her half-wrecked Galveston house, alive in a neighborhood spat out of the hurricane’s wood chipper, and holding up, like a burning jewel, her fingerprint preserved forever at the tip of the cast she held him in as her tongue lost his taste— as if, as if—when we weave the whole soul out of talk, when we repeat it in white papers and check-out counter rags, in press conferences, in lists of fatalities, in flocks of e-mails rising ahead of the market crash—as if then, and only then, our afterlife begins. [End Page 91]
Michael Collins is Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, College Station, where he teaches courses in creative writing and American literature. His work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Parnassus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Modern Philology, Poetry Canto, 2003 Best American Poetry, and Callaloo. His articles on Ishmael Reed and Etheridge Knight were recently published in PMLA. He received the Ph. D. in English from Columbia University.
