You said you’d never be like them—
sitting on heavy dining room chairs

dragged out onto the porch, fanning
their sweaty selves with the morning’s folded 

newspaper for any bit of a breeze it might create, 
sipping glasses of lemonade made from a powdered mix,

the glasses sweating as much or more than they, 
their arms crossed, not meaning to, but how could they not 

sound like priests rattling off the litany of saints 
at Sunday mass—them rattling off their own litanies—

of the sick, the dying, the cancer diagnoses, or the Big C, 
as they called it because if they said that word aloud, 

it’d jinx them to catch it—the litany of heart attack, of stroke, 
of dropped dead at the counter of their restaurant up on the highway. 

You said you’d never be like them—
that your life would be filled with the living, the living, the living, 

until, in a matter of seconds, it seemed, it was your turn 
on the porch with your sisters, fanning folded newspapers 

for any bit of a breeze, lemonade sweating in your glasses, 
and a litany—names you never thought you’d have to say aloud.