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What is bliss?

I imagine Job felt it, blessing the name of the Lord
who snuffed out his children like so many candles.

Joan of Arc, too, when the first torch-touched twig
snapped with hungry heat. Therese Neumann, starved,

weeping nervous blood, entranced in stigmatic ecstasies
while the world collapsed, yes, she felt it. And falling

from the greatest conceivable height, in the pit
of his stomach, surely Satan felt its first rumblings.

Walser, prematurely ending his final walk, facedown,
reading each snowflake as a tiny letter in the book of life,

his vision so suddenly small and all-encompassing. Galileo,
blind, arrested, reconciling the vast universe, its shifting

center, to the pain of his aging body. Every body will feel it,
at some time or other, probably too late. And then?

And then—

—
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They received their MFA from Alma College, and their work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, HAD, Pacifica Literary Review, The Q&A Queerzine, and elsewhere. Their debut chapbook Bliss Road is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press in May 2025.

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Have you read these poems:
Meditations in an Emergency by John Milkereit
Sixty-Six by Jody Reis Johnson

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