[Reagan died, I was 10. Mom watched the casket 3 days]

 
Reagan died, I was 10. Mom watched the casket 3 days
and 3 nights on Fox News while I fished 5 dimes
from couch cushions and stole 2 dollars cash
from her purse’s unemployment. My hero’s journey: I walk
through the back alley, past the gas station dumpsters,
past the lizards padding through sports bar runoff,
past the beat-up cars in the next-door lot blasting AM radio,
to the Circle K on the hill where I get a red and blue slushie
and a jalapeño-cheddar hotdog off the rolling plate for a cool $1.75.
It’s the first summer Friday, blessed be, and I’m a thief,
palming the goods out the door toward the storefront’s last sliver
of afternoon shade where I eat my hotdog beneath window ads
for Camel Blues, Budweiser, and the Arizona Lottery.
Nearby, two cop cars idle, windows down, officers’ arms hanging
lazily out the door. Their police radios click on and off
with each emergency they sit through, the operator’s gibberish
vowels distorting in the heat, ignored.
Raised Catholic, always a little guilty, I sip the slushie
and begin my regular bargain with god: keep this between us
and I’ll give you daily prayer and regular church.
Though I never hold up my end for long, I believe
god to be an honest, watchful, and forgiving listener.
                      But when I hear gunshots
and see the two cops peel out toward my house, down my street,
all fealty to deal-making is off. When I get to the scene, our next-door neighbor
Richard’s place, Sharky (my friend’s dad with 2 DV charges,
a mullet ten years out-of-style, and the better half of a 30 rack in the blood–)
is already slurring out his idiot revenge plot under the full weight
of a cop’s knee. I wave when they take him away, his sunburnt face
through the window tint the color of crushed red velvet. Bullet holes
crawl up Richard’s carport doorway like perfectly crushed roaches.
My father plays Runnin’ With the Devil, his favorite
Van Halen track, while he wraps Richard in a sweet gauze halo.
I snag a bullet casing off the ground when nobody’s looking
and as the front room TV flickers funerary, stash it in a box
in my room, a keepsake. That year, Richard would get a steel door,
paint it whiter than buttercream, become a man of faith,
and die from sepsis. As for me, for weeks I’d pull the casing out,
a little rosary bead, and say some prayers
I only half-knew: hail mary full of grace, the lord
is out to lunch, now and in the hour of our death, amen.