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What Good Is Heaven

By Raye Hendrix

when my mother dreamed of children she pictured
            things in bowls                        beautiful fish gracing over

brightly colored stones               clear water     a bowl of her favorite 
            fruits        ceramic overflowing pears and tangerines

blueberries fat     with sweet    I have always lived in secret   
            loved the dark water                 I have always been  

the rough-pocked bitter pit of peach     I remember being born          
            or at least the second time       when as a child 

I stumbled toddling      down the steep gravel road      down 
            off the sharp shoulder into       a twisting bed of briar     

and saw myself split    open on the thorns       witnessed
            what ‘til then had only   been inside: bee balm blossoms

on my arms and knees     a secret my body well kept 
            even then I tried to bury it         force self back

into antonym of self       but dying is not the same as being
            un-born           and I have never been any good at either

once it didn’t rain for weeks   but I wanted to be a fish so badly            
            I jumped off our pier and broke both ankles

in the drought-shallow shoals  and smiled that their new angles
            looked like fins                     once I watched my father

stripping dry-rotten wood from our porch       and as he pried 
            up the boards a family of opossums hissed like bulbous

vampires at the sunlight before they lit out for the edge
            of the woods     babies bobbing after mother like lures

on a troubled lake         everything is always looking
            for some new way to disappear

after the porch was fixed I loosened a board and crawled inside  
            over and over       each time pretending

I was crawling to the bottom         of my mother’s bowl of dream 
            fruit       something soft and pitless each time

I would emerge                           in the dark even the light
            -slatting planks were as large as black eternal sky

beams signaling Heaven or the break of dark
            water to surface                      the sun-clear water of day

even now I am always searching for something 
            to crawl into         some new way to be born

what good is Heaven to me anyway     what good
            are fish and fruit and day            I’m still the child

I always have been          hidden dark beneath the porch       
            pretending every nail hole is a star
 

 

 

 

Listen as Raye Hendrix reads What Good Is Heaven.
Added: Wednesday, January 29, 2025  /  Used with permission. The poem originally appeared in the Southern Indiana Review, and later appeared in the book "What Good Is Heaven" by Raye Hendrix (Texas Review Press, Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Alabama (2024)).
Raye Hendrix

Dr. Raye Hendrix is the author of What Good Is Heaven, a debut poetry collection selected to represent Alabama in the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series (Texas Review Press, 2024). Also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Raye is the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and the Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review, 2019). Their poetry appears in publications such as American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, The Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, and others. Raye the editor of Dis/Connect: A Disability Literature Column from Anomalous Press. She teaches in the English department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. 

Image Description: Raye Hendrix, a white, feminine person with red-brown hair, wears a black shirt and faces the camera in front of a forested background.

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