An Ode to the Demise of the Wake
by A.H. Jerriod Avant
amid the spirit-ridden believers
believin’ they’ve been in the storm
too long are the years between
which feel more brief than years have
ever movin’ beneath our feet grief is
not a bed of nails but the bed of nails
is grief it is a taste for the vanished
scattered through a desert of emotion
It is less concerned with the forlorn
but the bare reach for what is no
longer there So I be trynna keep
somethin’ physical around A 73rd
birthday ring capped off by citrine
and silver deep as fall is willing
to fall And when the spirits nudge
they feel no different than flesh
They’ll say somethin’ the people
who believe sing Satan we gon tear
your kingdom down Down
Yo’ kingdom is comin’ down.
A.H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, Muscadine, received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. He has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and an emerging-artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation of Boston. A former John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence, Avant is currently a University of Mississippi visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing.