The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Amy Miller's "White Noise Lullaby"

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Afterlife

My sister asks
if I think we’ll see our mother again.
I’m thinking I’ll see her Sunday,
play two-handed bridge, sit
on the couch for as long as it takes her
to tell me Dad is driving her crazy,
that she’s throwing up
even the liquid food now.

My sister means the afterlife,
her high, bright country club
where everyone sheds
their skin and forgets
what it means to be angry.
There’s no spit
in heaven, I think, no fight,
and how does everyone find each other?
How can we sit down
to that intelligent picnic?

I tell my sister I don’t know,
that I’m doing my seeing now.
I know exactly how to shame her.

This selection comes from Amy Miller’s chapbook White Noise Lullaby available now from Cyclone Press. Purchase your copy here!

Amy Miller‘s poetry has appeared in Bellingham Review, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, Northwest Review, Permafrost, Rattle, and ZYZZYVA, and the online chapbookRough House (whiteknucklepress.com). She won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, as well as the Whiskey IslandPoetry Prize and the Cloudbank Prize, and has been a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and the 49th Parallel Award. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she is the poetry editor of the NPR listening guide Jefferson Journal, works as the publications project manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.

Noh Anothai was a researcher with the Thailand-United States Education Foundation (Fulbright Thailand) from 2011-12. In that time he translated programs and hosted cultural events for Thailand’s College of Dramatic Arts under the Ministry of Culture. Winner of Lunch Ticket’s inaugural Gabo Prize for Translation and Multilingual Texts in 2014, Anothai’s original poems and translations of Thai poetry have appeared in Ecotone, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. He has contributed to Words Without Borders and Tin House, and serves as a reader for the international River Styx poetry contest. He teaches for the online MFA program in Creative Writing at Lindenwood University.