Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

When I die, I’m coming back to haunt the shit out of everyone who ever screwed me over in this lifetime.And I will be immune to your puny exorcisms. And if you’re on my afterlife shit list and you happen to get yourself dead before me, don’t consider yourself off the hook. Poor you, living or dead. I’ll be an Asian ghost. And Asian ghosts don’t fuck around. I’ll have fifty snakeheads. And in each of my heads, will be a clever brain. And each clever brain is going to remember exactly what you did. And the heads will take turns sleeping. When one sleeps, 49 sisters will be awake and sharpening their teeth on the whetstone of memory. And each of those 50 snake heads will command a set of dog-loyal hands that will salt your heart and shove it in your mouth eternally, and you will swallow again and again and again, motherfuckers.

Just saying.

Get to know the poet:

1) What is the theme of your poem?

"Revenge Theology with Hands" is all about finding power when you are made to feel powerless by the world outside.

2) What motivated you to write this poem? The 2024 US Elections. Plain and simple. The rage I felt and still feel watching just how much injustice is allowed to carry on unchecked by people who could stop it while all of us not in "power" just watch – I had nowhere to put that rage, except on the page. And if the Far Right "Christians" get to tell everyone how the afterlife is going to be? Well, I want a chance at the mic. I want to remind all of those people who seem to think they have the afterlife worked out for them that there's more than one kind of afterlife to be had. THAT's why I wrote this poem.

3) How long have you been writing poetry?

Since I was old enough to know that cat rhymed with hat and bat and sat and best of all...RAT.

4) If you could have dinner with one person (dead or alive), who would that be?

James Baldwin is the dead person I'd have dinner with. Gloria Steinem is the living person I'd have dinner with.

5) What influenced you to submit to have your poetry performed by a professional actor?

I wanted to hear what this poem would sound like in a mouth not mine. I always read my own poems as I write them, over and over. I wanted to hear someone else say the words. It sets the poem out in the world – a living thing.

6) Do you write other works? scripts? Short Stories? Etc..?

I'm writing a memoir right now about my life growing up with a very disturbed father, and being a first generation kid at a time when most people in the US didn't understand where my parents came from. Though writing a memoir is hard, I keep going. Because to give up would be worse than dying. I also write short stories – which are a little bit on the speculative fiction side (which, given the nature of "reality" now, could pass for non-fiction. Dystopia never gets old, does it?)

7) What is your passion in life?

Making things, writing things, reading, social justice. To me all of those four things are connected, and are fueled by the creative impulse.