On the Ferris Wheel at the County Fair, I Remember the YouTube Video About a Woman’s Near-Death Experience by Jackleen Holton

On the Ferris Wheel at the County Fair, I Remember the YouTube Video About a Woman’s Near-Death Experience

and wonder what it will be like, rising
from myself, husk shucked
and at last, not like her
brief rendezvous. She was lucky.
Death chose her from the throng
of writhing bodies
at the Manhattan nightclub
in her twenties, whispered
How high? as it shot her up
to heaven. I could have used that
wake-up call wrapped in a hit
of ecstasy back then,
could have learned what love
was much sooner.
But no. Let it be like this,
the world I’ve known growing
smaller beneath me, the sun
a thin orange crease
between ocean and sky,
everything aglow, and, yes, the love
that all the near-death people try
to describe, all of it shimmering
in this peach-colored light.

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Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Dogwood, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun, and others.