Afterwards By Jo Angela Edwins

Afterwards

What is it that makes the triste from the tryst, 
the stricken from the splendidly ablaze?
As if the huff and tumble must insist
upon a price that every lover pays
in growing quiet as the breathing slows.
When colors fade and bodies grow distinct,
we adopt the posture that nature bestows
upon the dying, enervated, unlinked
by energy to any living thing.
Who can be blamed, then, for naked weeping?
The wonder is we ever recover the sting
of excitement. There is mercy in the sleeping
that most of us fall to, then, from all the fretting,
and when we wake, God blesses us with forgetting.

Jo Angela Edwins has published in various venues, most recently in Amethyst Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Her chapbook Play was published in 2016. She has received awards from Winning Writers, Poetry Super Highway, and the SC Academy of Authors and is a Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, and Bettering American Poetry nominee. She lives in Florence, SC, where she serves as poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.