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.