1
The girl who martyred her dolls, sending them
To heaven to wait for her arrival,
Sentenced them to stones or fire or the force
Of her hands to tear them, methods she’d learned
From the serious, dark nuns who taught her.

She would press a pillow over my face
To encourage sainthood.  “Now,” she would say,
Leaning down, and I’d let myself go limp
And lie quietly for her arrangements.

Her hands clasped like Mary’s in the painting
Over her bed, she prayed for my body.
Sparingly, she sprinkled me with lotion.
Always, because she’d taught the proper way
To stare, my eyes were open when I died.

That summer, in the months before fourth grade,
Her uniforms waited in the closet
For September, her white communion dress
Beside them, declaring to St. Agnes, 
Who watched from the sunlit, opposite wall.

In August, her mother ran a vacuum 
Through the house, moving from the living room
Of St. Francis to the narrow hallway
Of Our Lady of Lourdes, and I stayed dead 

Until the sound reached that girl’s room, rising 
To her mother’s clenched roar of cleanliness,                     
Both of us keeping our feet off the floor, 
Giving her a swipe of room to work, clearing         
The way for temporary perfection.

2
The girl who loved to be touched in cemeteries,
Who said the dead reminded her to ecstasy,
Offered her body to my hands while I agreed,
Thanking the lost for their shadowed grove of headstones.

Always it was dark or nearly so, that girl shy 
About her disrespect or nakedness, until,
At last, approaching cemeteries in weak light
Made me want to fuck above a thousand strangers.

One night, accidentally, the death of someone 
Both of us knew, someone our age, meaning nineteen.
The violence of loss a lump underneath us
No matter which well-tended garden we entered.

Though frankly, we were exhausted by then, tired 
Of each other’s needs, and the dead could do nothing 
Except talk among themselves about our absence, 
Using the inaudible language of the earth.

3
The girl who died the following day
Is still talking in my car.  She sits
Beside me, knees drawn up to her chin
Like a pouting child.  Expectation
Is the only thing that will happen
Between us, the car’s radio full
Of the British Invasion until
I follow her under the driveway’s
Double floodlights to the house I will 
Never be inside. “Next week,” she says,
Before I drive past where she will die
In another boy’s new car, the site 
So often seen I notice nothing 
But oncoming headlights, the bright ones
Under the influence of midnight,
The day she will die just now begun,
The radio switched to Marvin Gaye
And James Brown, the road so familiar 
I can be careless with attention 
As I speed toward the unexpected, 
What weekends are for, story makers.