Heaven Being All Ice Now, Sing Me, Sister, Your Little Song of Fire

I.

The green bùbá of my country felt

silly in that spectral white of heaven. But it was

all Border Control would allow—the cloth

on my neck, futile against a fury

of snow that did not fall

like water off a duck’s back, but stuck

instead like leeches to my wine-

dark skin and sank

their hundred fangs of ice. I could not

speak of the inherent racism that followed

from earth, the obsidian jealousy.

On earth, birds-of-paradise have

long blue tails. What a shame

to have missed such brilliant foreshadowing.

The music of heaven is the blues.

No one here will hold

my frostbitten hands; no one here will pull me

back into the warm blanket of human viscera

I, in earthspeak, call a body—

a life. Heaven is the largest polar

desert of the afterlife, though you may think,

first, of hell.…