She walks into the room
where her husband sits,
deep in his chair.

She stops for sec to smile at him.
He looks up and says "What?!"

"Nothing. Jeez. Go back to your paper."

"What the hell is it now? All I said was 'What?'"

"And all I did was smile. It's a habit. It was the way I was raised. My mother would always smile when she saw
me come into the room. She was happy to see me. So I was just smiling."

She feels ready to cry but refuses it.

"Fine. See. I'm smiling. How are you? Nice to see you since the last time, what was it, five minutes since the last time I saw you."

He shakes the paper into order and pulls it in front of his face.

Quickly and hidden, she gives him the finger, slips into the kitchen,
opens the refrigerator,
and stands there.
Shaking.

She shuffles around, tying to find some use for her being there.
She twists the faucet knobs tighter.
A tiny drop of water clings
to the faucet's lip.
She refolds a hand towel,
pulls a loose fringe out,
rolls it into a tiny ball between her finger and thumb and walks
to the other side of the kitchen
to throw it out.

She stands above the trashcan,
holds her arm out straight
and drops that tiny ball of fluff,
as if off the side of a tall building.

She stands there and waits
until it hits bottom,
leaving nothing to chance.

Miami, 1989

The moving vans
keep on the go in
this little neighborhood.
The rental companies
make special mailings
advertising low rates on
half-day rentals.

They know.

Their advertisements are practical
and somber like a funeral home bill.

On Sundays,
the men fill one house
and then another.

Their slow procession
cuts along the sidewalks,
moving between the houses,
as if among tombstones.

From the houses, they carry
stacks of books under their arms,
strap end chairs to car roofs,
fill trunks with tennis rackets and roller blades,
and beach chairs that sometimes spill last summer's sand
over a black carpeted spare tire.

You can walk into any house here
and sit on a dead friend's sofa,
watch a dead man's TV,
eat breakfast
at a dead lover's table.

You'll water a fern that survives him.

A time or two, usually just after the funeral,
you can look over at a chair,
and see him in it.
You can listen to a record
and hear him da-da-ing along.
You can read from a book
and see him in his chair
the book laying open on his lap,
as he nods in and out of sleep
and back-lit by a shimmering
Sunday afternoon.

Other times can you drink
from a pink flamingo coffee mug
and see him sitting cross-legged
on a tightly-cornered bed,
with bruise-purple blotches
spread like storm clouds
across his tight, pale scalp,
his dark eyes resting at the bottom
of their sockets, like sunken ships,
as the jagged corners of his bony body
break the surface of bleached white blanket.

But soon enough,
the visions stop.

That chair
becomes any chair.
That book
becomes any book.

Around here,
Sundays are moving days.
The rest of the week
is for dying.

Charlottesville, 8/12/2017

In the early moments,
we didn’t know who it was
behind the wheel
or who it was
that was dead.

So, for a half-hour,
it was just a death.

Unaffiliated.

And it didn’t matter whose
it was.

And then I watched the video.


And then it mattered.