Burying Louise

by Dan Rosenberg

I

The strange home

they carried

her sealed corpse to

was passive, beige.

With an honor façade

to fool whom?

Her god’s sterile

ritual, fine. Fine. We

saw the street sign

—“Dead End”—

& laughed down

our thickening throats:

the final

human moment

we exited.

*

My mostly vacant

uncle, her son,

forgery-crowned,

whispered a sad suit

into our path. Blister-

minded, he guided us

out back, said,

in the halls of privacy

the son who pays

calls the shots. And we

are unwelcome.

Thus broke the son

again his dead

mother, and this

strange caretaker

of what’s left.

II

So few stones

here in the want-home

of not living. We stood

for seconds, maybe,

aberrant Jews upright

on the cross-strewn

corpse-plane, uncertain

of standing on heads

or feet in the piercing

rows of white slabs.

*

Alone we placed

the memory-stone

where her body wasn’t,

where her name, that

absence of stone,

would be.

Husband-empty too, this

site of missing.

We hovered over

nothing, what

was left, let it in.