How to Live Poem #3: The Day after I Die | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

How to Live Poem #3: The Day after I Die

they will find the cure
for whatever got me,
and a unified theory
of physics will be announced
by a consortium
from M.I.T.

Following the funeral,
Earth will be contacted by
intelligent beings from
the Farquhar galaxy—
immediately after which
Tesla will announce a car
that can run forever
on table scraps.

Within the week,
Abbott Labs will introduce
an age-reversing cream
on the very heels of
a morning-after diet pill
that tastes exactly
like a Cadbury’s Easter Egg.

Finally,
the woman they hire to clean
and fumigate my house
will come across a sheaf
of my old poems (tucked
optimistically inside a catalogue
from The Gap) 

and turn them over to
her Thursday client, Billy Collins,
who (ignoring an infinitesimal twinge
of envy) will gallantly take charge
and see to everything--
including, of course,
any immortality.


"The Day after I Die" was originally published in Subject to Change and is republished here with the kind permission of the author.

The ALL Review is pleased to present our How to Live series, poems chosen to help readers navigate these difficult and rapidly changing times. 

About the Author

Wisconsin Poet Marilyn L. Taylor

Marilyn L. Taylor, Ph.D., is a former Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin and the city of Milwaukee. She taught poetry for the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for fifteen years, and is the author of eight poetry collections. Taylor’s poems and essays have also appeared in Poetry, Able Muse, Measure, Light, Raintown Review, and Rhino, among many other well-known journals and anthologies. She was awarded the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for verse in forms, and has been a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Parody Contest, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet award, and the 2017 Lascaux Review prize. She teaches regularly at Lawrence University’s Bjorklunden Seminar Center and elsewhere, and serves as a Contributing Editor for two poetry journals (Verse-Virtual and Third Wednesday). Her newest book, titled Outside the Frame: New and Selected Poems, was published by Kelsay Books in December, 2021... Read More


April 2020

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