Kate LaDew

1. the police tell him he needs to hurry

his ex-wife and father-in-law

are meeting with the hitman,

make yourself look dead,

what do dead people look like?

he closes his eyes,

flings out his arms, his tongue,

the way he did as a child

when his little brother shot him with a cap-pistol,

suddenly, his kids are there, all backpacks and light-up shoes,

they have to hurry so his wife makes it a game,

holds up her phone, daddy is playing pretend,

it's a joke, what do dead people look like?

and his kids, his three little girls, fall to the floor,

head, mouths lolling, hands, feet limp,

chests immobile, hair over their faces to hide the life in their eyes,

this is what they do during active shooter drills,

when they stop shooting, play dead, not wounded,

don't make them want to shoot you again,

he's never seen them so still,

he shakes them, yelling no no no and they are frightened

and his wife is shooing them into their bedrooms,

and he is on the kitchen linoleum, head angled,

he can see under the refrigerator,

cheerios and cat toys and elastic hair bands and his wife is saying,

calm down, you're shaking, they won't believe it,

and, years later, when dateline sets up in their living room,

3-point lighting bright like christmas,

his face is powdered, tie straightened,

the blonde journalist he's only seen in blurs as he walked up the stairs,

leaving his wife to her murder shows, across from him,

head cocked, sympathy in her voice, the tilt of her shoulders,

he will choke up just once as he tells his story,

his ex-wife, his father-in-law,

the undercover cop they unwittingly hired to get rid of him,

just once he will cry, just a little,

thinking about the pink daisy barrett under the refrigerator,

when his little girls said, no, daddy, like this,

this is what dead people look like,

we know, we've practiced

2. I'm tempted to darkness,

(after robert lewis reid, tending the garden)

what is it? under the pale pink of her hands,

pale pink dress like a bell around her, vibrating silently,

shadowy silver watering can, silver trowel,

what is it? dark hair in a tight french braid tucked under itself,

the barest hint of a stray strand curling on the nape of her neck,

what is it? deep red flowers black at the edges,

twin, triplet, quadruplet, quintuple on and on

watery green potted plants roaming up the a-frame trellis,

what is it? I think of the worst things, a bloody axe, a dead baby,

a severed hand bound to roving, writing letters in the dark

(where are you? where am I not?) anything dead, dead, dead,

her eyes are hidden, head down in concentration,

what is it? something without roots, without tendrils to sink,

all the dead things, wouldn't something alive be worse?

3. as the mall crumbles

and the fountain is drained,

would it be unseemly

to scoop up the pennies,

the quarters and dimes,

to spend the wishes

at the closeout sales,

the last chances,

the going out of businesses,

profiles of presidents

pouring on service counters like water

I'd like a million dollars

a brand new car

a new job

lose ten pounds

and then

make my mother better

don't let him die

ease their pain

make him stop drinking

let him love me

let her remember

don't let him hit me again

let me be happy

all true wishes are the same at the end of things

please, forgive me,

so spend, spend spend spend