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Jaswinder Bolina
"And it'd make sense for the thing you feel least
in the afterlife to be the thing you felt most

in the current life, though you'd have to admit
if there's an afterlife, it'd mean this life

is 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 perfectly

healthy and ordered him a round of shots
before redeploying us to another six-month stint

in the wild. But that thing she said really stuck with me,
sitting beside you the whole bus ride home and later

feeding 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 loaf

off 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 submit

to the next one, where I may never feel again
as I do beside you tonight, sopping up

bouillabaisse, my serious love, with the soft guts
of a baguette on a Friday in a life

I must've qualified for and justly received,
I know not the hokey jurisprudence of why.
from the journal THE GETTYSBURG REVIEW
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