Poetry: “Aftermath” by Christian Paulisich
Christian Paulisich’s “Aftermath,” veers in an out of focus. The voice of the speaker is haunting in their self awareness. We see their consciousness of craft in the deliberate inversion and observation of the simile and metaphor they employ from the first lines—the pills are now maracas, and the ears, which are immediately stripped of human specificity, are trembling, rather than another word that is more commonly used in everyday speech.
It’s exactly this kind of intentionality that makes this poem so powerful. We see the micro and the macro in one place. The impact of the speaker’s desire for “endless sweetness,” and then “more of it,” feels idealistic, but to talk about these subjects is brave, and admitting these pure impulses is the way we make change. When we talk about the bad things, we are taking the first steps.This is how we start the movement.
Aftermath
Everything laced with deceit, our weed
laced with fentanyl. The crepe myrtle
shakes, full of pills: maracas
trembling in the ears, incessant.
When everything goes loud, I want silence
and nothing touching me. Alone,
I want someone to fill
that silence, their body like cereal
in my bowl. I want
the little rice pellets to pop
as I pour the milk. I want to hear the crunch.
I want endless sweetness and then
more of it. The news
is an endless train of Angus Clouds, accidental
meant to soften
the blow of an overdose
come morning
no one will speak of. Your childhood friend. My cousin.
I want to fill the silence that follows
but smoke has scorched
my throat. Tens of thousands
each year, does it matter how it happens?
If we mourn the same, bleed
the same sap of if only he had
a better life? The rest of us left
to clean the mess of
someone else’s dish, lamenting each
shadowless petal on the pavement’s split lip.
Christian Paulisich
Christian Paulisich received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He was recently chosen as an honorable mention for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry and a finalist for Frontier Poetry's 2024 Nature & Place Contest, and received a Summer 2024 fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Southeast Review, Literary Matters, Denver Quarterly, the Atlanta Review, New American Writing, and other magazines.
