Tag: NDE

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

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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.

*

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.

There’s Always Something by Carlin Corsino

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There’s Always Something

            After his near death experience,
Al Pacino confirms “there’s nothing there” after we die –
            “you’re gone”

He confirms as if
we’d all already agreed
the afterlife didn’t rock a little bit
like a chair on the porch
of a country store, air
smelling softly of apple spice
straw brooms and the candle
whose wax drips slowly
onto the floor pressing
its seal on the stamped
envelope of our lives. As if
we all already believe that
when we depart we will not
enter a foyer and hear
a knock when answered
the stomping heels
of flamenco dancers
and brass band
hung brightly all night above
us like string lanterns.
How may we believe you,
carte blanche, Al Pacino
who visited death
like a factory tour
and returned like a door
to door salesman peddling
an end to the miracle akin
to that nothing of when
we were children hiding
quietly under old blankets
in grandmother’s attic so long
we feared they forgot about us
in that pitch black as lungs
filled with must and all
we could hear was that empty
suck in the walled pipes
as the last little bit of liquid
light slipped in its vortex
down the claw foot tub of life.
So how can we believe you, Al
because even that nothing
was something, right?

*

Carlin Corsino is a poet from North Carolina who writes about the everyday and absurdities of American life. They are recently featured or forthcoming in 3ELEMENTS and KAKALAK.