Winter/Spring 2015

The woman who washes my wife’s hair
tells her she’s a mortician’s assistant
and spends her weekdays
preparing the dead while only
working part time at the beauty shop
because business is slow these days.
The only people dying are old folks
and Mexicans, she says. What’s really
weird is that when you wash a dead
person’s hair, their ears move. Business
is also bad because more people are choosing
cremation, picking fire over
slow disintegration, a quick burst
over entropy. The Mexican
dead are beautiful, she says.
They’re always dressed in white,
and the children look so lifelike,
I expect them to rise from the casket.

Once, though, she accidentally pulled
off the scalp of a five year old girl
but managed to fix it before the viewing.
It’s so important to honor the dead,
she tells my wife. I hear this story

hours later and imagine the beautiful Mexicans,
clad in the purest white, dancing in Paradise.
I imagine the dead waking in their radiant clothes,
bare feet brushing against the cumuli that
is the dance floor of heaven. And a Mariachi band, all fiddles
and guitars, ushers them into the Kingdom
where everyone, including Jesus himself, is brown, black,
or some sweet shade in between, and the angels’ hair
is sweet-smelling and luminous, drenched in
the steady glare of constellations.