Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.

If you’re good you go to Heaven when you

die and bad you go to Hell and in be
-tween I’m not so sure, in between is Earth
I want to say but to be sure I asked
my Sunday School teacher for the story
and she explained that everybody dead
is in one place or the other and as
for Earth, yes, it’s in between but no one
gets to hand here for Eternity, just
his dead body or hers or anyone
else’s and even then corpses rot a
-way and recycle into atoms which
come together as something wholly new
or maybe that was holy or maybe
it was both, like Earth is good and bad.

My Sunday School teacher told me after

she tossed me out of class this morning that
I’ll be very happy in Hell, that’s where
I’ll be going, she says, if I die with
-out getting saved first, which was not very
nice, I think, almost just as bad as Hell
itself and I told her so and she went
as red as fiery flames or damn near and
that’s when I ran all the wy home, not that
I was scared so much as terrified, there’s
a difference, I guess – was running for
my life and when I hit the back porch still
running I tripped and fell. You’ve fallen twice
is what she’d say and I’d ask her Well, where
were you to raise me up? Maybe next week.