April 4, 1968

by Michael McFee

My cousin prayed King would die
and he did. She was 13, unlucky,

a lonely girl who square-danced
instead of dating. At practice

that rainy night she whispered
in her partner’s lifted ear,

“I’m glad he’s dead, ain’t you?”
That country boy’s face grew

peculiar, warping like a trick
mirror, its surface flickering

between uneasy pleasure and fear.
Less than five years before

she’d traced a maudlin likeness
of JFK on onionskin, kissed

his blue lips, wept, then pressed
it in the family Bible under Deaths

even though she’d already boasted
on the bus that her folks voted

for Nixon. Later she would canvass
support for McGovern, embarrassed

by her ignorant parents’ politics,
angry that she somehow missed

all the wars, good causes, rights,
the clear allegiances. But that night

she danced each step with vicious joy,
her body required by all the boys

who spun and lifted it and clutched
her to their chests, their sweaty touch

sheltering her from that dark man
who deserved to die, his last sermon

crackling across the TV’s altar
a threat, she felt somehow, to her

undeveloped future, a shadow,
cast on her crisp crinoline’s glow

despite the footlights, the shuffle
of her feet not quite muffling

that echo drifting from the empty
back row of the chained balcony.


Michael McFee has published five collections of poetry — Plain Air, Vanishing Acts, Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board, Colander, and Earthly — and has a sixth forthcoming. He has also published two anthologies, The Language They Speak Is Things To Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets (UNC Press, 1994) and This is Where We Live: New North Carolina Short Stories (UNC Press 2000). He has also collaborated with photographer Elizabeth Matheson on To See (North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1991). He currently teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill.

From Vanishing Acts (Gnomon Press, 1989), © 1989, Michael McFee. Used by permission of the author.