By Joanne Dominque Dwyer

When I get to heaven, I find the inhabitants shoeless,
braless, stock portfolio-less. Everyone has yellowed teeth.

Barbers save the hair they sweep up from the floors,
feed it to hogs, make winter hats with it. No such thing as

windows, only holes in the walls, and murals on the walls
of leaping antelopes and trapeze artists in glittery spandex.

People stare at the airbrushed pigmented semblances the way
they once bored their eyes into television and computer screens.

No one owns a car, speedboat, or lawnmower. No grass to cut,
as people eat the planted seeds before they can take hold in dirt.

Then soccer fields germinate and luxuriate inside their stomachs.
Jesus used the word inherit, and on long scavenging strolls I’ve

accrued my inheritance of eleven colorful elastic hairbands,
one snow cone-making machine, and a tiny dehydrated seahorse.

The most prized item in heaven is a black baby doll.
Inhabitants sign up years in advance to hold it for a day.

Self-same as on earth: alcohol is drunk as anesthetic.
I never tire of the pelicans pecking the mosquitoes

from the air; never get used to watching God eat
such a bounty of fried potato and caper sandwiches.

Though he stays as thin as the thrushes and threadsnakes—
and the pencils some of us hoard.

Joanne Dominique Dwyer has two poetry collections: Rasa, chosen by David Lehman for the Marsh Hawk Prize (2022), and Belle Laide (Sarabande Books, 2013). She is a Rona Jaffe Award-winner and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Dwyer was also included in Best American Poetry 2019. She has been a visiting poet to elders with memory loss and, through support from the Witter Bynner Foundation, a poetry facilitator to adolescents in New Mexico. She is also a ceramics artist.