Some Days I Sound Like a Nihilistic John Lennon (Song)

Poetry / By / / 1 minute of reading

Imagine there’s no heaven, and hell
is explained to us by the Quran
as the thing muddying our faces.

How would a hardened ego become sensitive
to the living breeze of divine grace?

It would avoid imagining the ethical incongruity
of an eternal heaven for the elect.

And it definitely wouldn’t picture those elected
dropping little wreaths onto the earth from paradise.

When Louis Desau asks How do I make this better?
tell him: Dress like fucking Demeter, and
make it clear that it’s Demeter when she searches
for Persephone and lets everything die.

Yesterday I was having lunch with Maggie
and the waitress arrived as I said
It’s complicated. France itself was great, and
I still love the culture
and want to master the language
even though I keep thinking of France
as where I was at when my father had his stroke.

The waitress took our orders before saying
I can totally relate. For me
heaven and hell are both the mid-90s.

About The Author

Anthony Sutton received his B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston where he won the Gulf Coast Fellowship in Undergraduate Creative Writing, was an honorable mention for the Brian Lawrence Award, and, with Glass Mountain, won the AWP National Program Director’s Prize. Since then he’s received fellowships from Gemini Ink and The Poetry at Roundtop Festival. Other poems from Anthony have appeared or are forthcoming in Nothing. No One. Nowhere., Anklebiters Press, The FUHA Zine, and The Aletheia. Currently he is poetry editor for Houston and Nomadic Voices and social media coordinator for Ostrich Review. In the fall he’ll be an MFA candidate at Purdue University.
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