In Heaven There Is No Beer

by Taylor Brorby

for Monsadius Hatzenbihler

A hot June day, but you’re swaddled in sheets—

towel for a bib, wrapped around your neck.

You can’t keep water down anymore the aunts

tell me. Instead, a sponge on a stick,

colored like a cherry sucker, brings cool relief

to the cave of your mouth. Light slips between

the slits of blinds and I touch your soft, weathered

hands—supple, up and down the fingers move

as I tell you I’m here. In and out whistles

your breath as I talk about trout—rainbows

and browns heavy with a late spring sulfur

hatch. When I ask you How do you feel?

you breathe—Just like an eight-pound trout.

-

We hold hands as I pull-out my phone—

and then that old familiar voice crinkles

across the airwaves: It’s so nice to have you

with us tonight—wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful.

-

I close my eyes and see circles—

you and Grandma, long buried, turning

and turning around the floor. You steal a grin

as the two of you hop to the polka.

-

Now, in hospice, we listen, you and me,

as Mr. Welk waves his baton.

And then it’s our turn to sing.

Your eyes snap open and your cheeks

slide back like curtains.

In heaven, there is no beer,

that’s why we drink it here.

And when we’re gone from here—

my voice breaks, my eyes turn to wells

of water as you sing—all our friends

will be drinking all our beer.

Our hands, twined together, bob

in time to the beat as you drift and whistle,

wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful.

TAYLOR BRORBY is the author of Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and the forthcoming memoir Coal and Oil: A Fossil Fuel Baby’s Environmental Education. His work explores the Bakken oil boom and the history of North Dakota. A native of Center, he teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York.