Most poems about death try either to comfort us or to frighten us. Emy G's "Where do we go when we Die!" does something less common: it shrugs, almost politely, and then turns the question back on the reader. The speaker's answer is blunt ("I will go nowhere"), and the rest of the poem tries to show that this is nothing to dread. Death is pictured simply as a list of subtractions: "No memory to live / No body to to breathe." The central idea is that the fear of death is something we carry around, not something death itself imposes, and that it can be put down.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no steady beat. Short, flat statements sit beside longer, tumbling lines, which suits a voice that sounds like someone arguing in conversation rather than performing. The second stanza is almost comically agreeable. Whether you say "burn or fly" or rebirth, she will "nod my head" and answer "reincarnation i guess." That "i guess" is a deliberate shrug. Then a single line, "However, i will add," stands alone like a speaker clearing their throat, and tolerance sharpens into argument. The poem keeps addressing a "you" and even quotes that person's objection ("Will i disappear you ask"), so the reader is drawn in as a debating opponent.
The centrepiece of the argument is the claim that "Sleep is mini death." It is a slightly shaky analogy, and the poem seems to know it, conceding that you will wake up. But there is a neat twist in the logic. Sleep is "a necessity for survival / Or you'll die," so we rely on something that resembles death in order to avoid death. We feel no fear of sleep, so why fear its larger version? "Is death not the same?" is never fully answered, but it makes the reader pause.
The most memorable image is the bug. Fear is "a bug crawling up your spine / In the back of your mind": small, itchy, persistent, and out of reach where you can't swat it. This makes fear physical and faintly unpleasant rather than grand and tragic. When the speaker says she is "murdering that fear," the metaphor completes itself, since a bug is what you squash. It returns near the end as a possible afterlife, with the soul becoming "another bug in cracked stone," followed by "i have murdered it too." Judging by the imagery, even the least dignified reincarnation has lost its power to scare her. The violent verb is also striking. Her imagined critics call her a "sociopath," yet the only thing she kills is a feeling.
There is a quiet paradox in the poem's logic. She begins with "nowhere," but by the end her soul "could go anywhere," and the two words differ only by a prefix. Her calm does not come from certainty. She speaks of what she "believe[s]," and admits there is "No certainty you'll go anywhere." Her courage lies in being able to leave the question open. The repeated "No" at the start of lines ("No memory," "No body," "No brain") also lets "No body" read as "nobody," so the speaker pictures herself becoming no one at all, and says it without flinching.
The ending is where the poem becomes a challenge. "I am not afraid of death / But are you?" reverses the title's question, from where we go to how we feel about it. The title's exclamation mark is interesting here. It sounds louder than the composed voice that follows, and a reader might wonder, as an inference, whether some bravado lives alongside the calm. The poem's rough edges, such as the doubled "to" and the wandering lowercase "i," add to the impression of thinking caught mid-sentence rather than polished.
That unpolished honesty is part of its interest. The poem takes on one of the biggest questions there is in plain words, refuses to preach, and leaves the final judgement with the person reading.