Jay Aelick

poetry

Jay Aelick is a nonbinary writer and critic who makes up 1/2 of the SBU English Club Podcast, where real critique partners at a fake university workshop the internet’s most infamous books. They hold an MFA from North Carolina State University and are a former Fulbright Austria Teaching Assistant. Their work can be found in The Journal, Kestrel, Poetry South, Okay Donkey, the International Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

 

To My Grandmother, on All Hallows’ Day

Today, I am grateful for the pie tin, its straightforward emptiness. Outside, the lid of the sky snaps shut at last, locking totally to the horizon. Better to know for certain it won’t be lifted for some months now than to spend each evening wondering if this will have been the final day of lukewarm sun. Good riddance to this indecisive season, the crows muttering something that sounds like my name from somewhere unseen. Hard to say if they are even really there, or if they’re just what I expect to hear on days like these. You are dead. Yesterday, your body was still here— were you? In a choice between what is comfortable and what is true, I want to believe I want to believe what is true. I press my hand to the cool of the pie server, that last sliver of autumn. That planchette I refuse to be the one to move.

“ I wrote this poem partially as an exercise in epistemic humility in the wake of my grandmother's passing. Though I have been an atheist for over a decade, I see no reason to rule out the possibility of the existence of supernatural entities—such as ghosts—nor any reason to be sheepish about inviting them to speak to me. After all, if they are real, it seems probable I could learn a great deal from them.”