Someone calls the afterlife a palace
of portraits hung in empty halls then mauls
the meat and veggie platters. We cannot
decide how best to honor our friend’s life.
Small comfort words will be as we gather
in Ballroom C beneath Archduke Leopold
and a hundred others gone before us.
This game’s about surrender and windows
of time during which we try to resist
temptations set by existentialists.
His mother’s adorned with black lace; by the
casket his father’s mask of grief’s in place.
Death’s a stage of life, they insist, though they
prefer we rehearse our lines somewhere else,
so we smile at the other ghosts and wonder
what type of gilded frame might fit each face.
Former owner of a Brooklyn craft beer bar, SM Stubbs was born & raised in south Florida. His first book, Learning to Drown (Gunpowder Press) will be released in 2025. He is a recipient of a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and winner of the 2019 Rose Warner Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Carolina Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, December, and The Rumpus.