Do You Believe in Afterlife?

The Southern Review recently excavated a poem by Aliki Barnstone from 2002, “My Friend Steve Asks if I Believe in the Afterlife.” It begins:

When a boy delivering her eulogy / first uttered “mother,” a baby sparrow/ landed on his head . . .

Find the rest this way.

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Casey Dayan is a Rumpus intern and musician. He is finishing up his undergraduate studies in literature and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he is working on a memoir and trying to one-up Jeff Buckley. Find his twitter here, @caseydayan. Find his band, “Moo,” here.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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