The Afterlife

    In Heaven, it is always autumn.
            —John Donne, “On the Nativity”

The old saw tells us a broken clock, 
in its infinite wrongness, is right two times 
a day. But the broken crime scene clock is always 
right, forever fixing the stale coordinates 
of the act with its two dead hands. 
In Forensics Heaven, it is perpetually 7:24, 
and the crime has always just happened.

In the city park, the broken clocks 
sit on familiar benches, taking the sun, 
though it doesn’t take them. 
Nothing, not a glimmer, registers 
on those crazed surfaces, those intricately 
ruined faces, as the day passes 
them by. The wheels refuse to turn 
and mesh. Their hands idle in the stark
white space where Time has forever
just ended, and where it is always 
April of 96. July of 03. Or 
February of 99.

Lee Passarella acts as senior literary editor for Atlanta Review magazine and as editor-in-chief for FutureCycle Poetry. His work has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, Louisville Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, and Cortland Review. Swallowed up in Victory, Passarella’s long narrative poem based on the American Civil War, was published by White Mane Books in 2002. In addition, he has published two other books of poetry: The Geometry of Loneliness and Sight-Reading Schumann.