Today my students asked me
how I wanted to die. They gave me
options. The guillotine, drawn and
quartered, broken on the wheel. We went
back and forth. They told me, Bene mori
est libenter mori. They told me, Melior est dies
mortis die nativitatis. I said where did you learn
that word. They said they read it in the
Bible. We considered those on the scaffold
who stretched their hands in supplication
for God’s grace not that of men.
We met them in the air to claim our reward.
Like them we raised our bound fists for the
sympathy of the scaffold crowd, for
the fame sempiternal, the power
and the glory. We meditated upon
the swollen head of the hanged,
the bulging eyes, purpled lips, mottled
and blotched skin beneath canvas bag, Jack
Ketch rolling the fabric over the eyes
and the nose so gently, his fingertips
brushing the cheeks like a whisper. Or
a kiss. We told some jokes, a little
humor to keep things moving,
keep things light. We practiced the hypnic
jerks of the body as it swung, heard the
wood creaking overhead, speculated on
the weight the gibbet’s beam
could hold. The mitres posed a curious
problem. We worked them out with pencil
and paper. Maybe we could take
a field trip, they said. We want to see
the gallows. We want to read from the
ordinary’s book. I said as long as you
behave. I said this too is meaningless.
***
Charles Michael Pawluk’s poetry is forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, and his fiction appears in Witness, Faultline, MoonPark Review, and Tiny Molecules. He has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Buffalo and teaches in Annapolis, MD.
***
image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 