YOU CAN BRIEFLY HOLD SOME  clouds in the palm of your hand. Others will swallow you whole with a mist mouth until you’re whiteblind, damp and shivering. They look the same from where we stand, miles below, faces craned up like images of rapture. Big and small mean nothing in the grand scheme of things; one strong enough gust of wind, and both the gentle and the consuming blow away. On the day of my aunt’s funeral, as on all days, I can’t discern which form my grief takes. But I do know the air is dead calm. I used to think I was born late, and I’d die never. Immortal, until proven otherwise. Only imperfect so as not to offend the gods. Without a breeze, my emotions sit on my skin like pimples, and I want to pick at them until the bumps turn into open wounds, just so I can see what gets in. Stitches are for the vain or dying. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and if I am finally honest, someday, I might be here in this cemetery too. My grandparents are 50 yards away. My best friend, somewhere nearby. In Florida, they move caskets on golf carts. It’s too hot for pallbearers, or maybe the Jewish cemetery is just more open to using Florida’s most abundant resource. My aunt is in an urn though, so instead we walk to the small plot where we are, for some reason, still burying her. I think I’d rather be a tree. One that bears fruit. Maybe with a swing. My father says the same, and it would be nice to have a family orchard. My mother doesn’t like to talk about it at all. Bad luck, to invite the universe to consider your absence. I don’t know if you’re ever too old to be an orphan, but she’s alone now, with her sister gone. All this talk about the loneliness epidemic. I don’t think anyone truly knows what it means to be that alone. I don’t, but I pretend sometimes. The sun beats down on us as we lower my aunt, and I am sweating which means I’m alive. I don’t know if it’s from the heat, or the way I’m running through every stage of grief like it’s some race I can win, instead of what it really is: a commensal organism living inside me that sometimes still decides to hurt at will, without warning or reason. I swat at a mosquito, though I’m not sure I have any blood left to suck. Kill the small thing to make myself feel large. I’m trying to be the swallower instead of the swallowed, but I think I’m choking. Or crying. They always feel the same. When I look up, the clouds are gone. Florida has so much sky and nothing to fill it with. Task done, we head toward our cars, a bevy of bleeding-heart doves. When I walk out the gates, I hold my breath, but quietly, secretly, I hope something follows. •





Ava Loomar is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated poet and journalist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her poems have appeared in Bruiser, Stone Circle Review, Dodo Eraser, Anthropocene Poetry Journal, Alien Buddha Press, JAKE, Eunoia Review, and Sky Island Journal, among others.

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