by Katie Kenney
At the doctor’s office the carpet cloudy,
matching magazines so melancholy
with weepy celebrity stories, watery walls
for wild vines reaching to nowhere.
Curled-up posters of the elderly
with your disease, so happily
the mere picture of living
with a single peppy foot inside the grave.
They’re saying the secret of living is knowing
that you can die joyfully as the heat
flutters crinkled Halloween
bunting draping disgracefully on flimsy office doors.
Death shimmies in the season to remind
you that each beginning brings
an end of tending to the living,
so the living may tend the dead.