Although I concede: burials should be
an occasion of final rites, pomp
and happenstance, if you will,
with at least one moaner who may or may
not know the departed. And so
I gather alone

with a shovel in my backyard
and his needle in my forethought.
I offer what I have to give—these brick pavers,
his cheap urn, the memory of my sister’s
fist through our childhood home’s window
and the gentle way he sobered to wrap
her paw in an old shirt.

Read it in The Georgia Review