154154 As the Sun falls behind the yew tree, I watch you making your rounds, and I think to myself, When will my world end? Will we be 90 and 93— next-door neighbors in assisted living? Or will we be 25 and 28— will I die falling? As the Sun sets behind the funeral home you hug your partner, brother of the deceased, and I see how Grief—The Sculptor—digs brute fingers and blunt nails into the faces of my loved ones, rearranging their features, carving bags under their eyes and frown lines where there should be dimples, and I understand his inability to write his brother’s obituary. I imagine the damnation of living with a sibling as a corpse, and my chest becomes so cold and hollow, I fear I mirror Joshua. A grimace slashing a pale face, frozen on waxy lips, and I do not feel that mine would ever thaw. I avoid the once-warm man who laughed with his brother while I laughed with you. He had a gap between his front teeth. He had a full head of beautiful, brown curls that are now dull, and piled atop his concaved skull. Your hair is curled, and I imagine you in the future, your wedding in Sedona, hair flowing in front of red-rocked mountains, so vibrant and alive that staring into the Sun would bring relief to my watering eyes. It is pitifully dim compared to you, but I have to thank it for being Evan Allee Doomsday 155 the most appropriate thing to metaphorize you. On July 15th, you burst from the Sun, a star in the shape of a big sister— too incandescent to be concealed by the casket I imagined you in, unbidden, when I finally took a look at Joshua, and that body looked nothing like him. My life is spent preparing and I am sure you would be concerned, but when a happy man is scorned by death, it’s natural—taking shelter from the storm. But time is a dormant volcano— and is that an earthquake, or the cry of a newly-dead’s loved one? Are you in your 60s—is it quick and painless? A heart attack? A car crash? Homicide? Type II diabetes? Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease? Will you forget me years before time rips my soul from yours? Have you been suffering—are we relieved your pain has an expiration? Will we be 90 and 93—mercifully, next-door neighbors in assisted living? Or 25 and 28—will one of us die falling? If mercy is not a privilege I am granted, I will spare a warning: If the world tried to take you, I would burn it to the ground. If it didn’t give you back, I would light up the ash, I would let flames swallow exorbitant wealth and drown the ocean in orange—global warming is a hoax; it’s just a person in mourning. I am warning the world for the horror I would become, I am no longer a pacifist; I am a liaison with a gun, shooting at the Sun, and as sparks rain over the heads of the innocent, my hands 156 will stay cupped, outstretched in demand for the remnants of Heaven to give what was once my sister back to me, even if she is one spark of debris. I will be the reason we are cloaked in darkness, I will be the heat that suffocates the stragglers. This will be of no concern to me; I would rather be damned than an only child. Moral codes are inconsequential without you to love me; they’re no more than a conch shell reverberating vain blood back to me. The rain will make mud and your footsteps will be as permanent as the relentless shore of Destin Beach where I walked behind you, my little feet sinking into your steps— the waves ate the proof of our lives, yet we continued to feed it, but I will let my vengeance starve it without you to walk with. Beaches we once loved will no longer exist for tiny feet to skip through; I will not watch children who are not our own crash through foamy waves and dig for seashells while I dig a grave. What a sick and twisted sculpture I could make … But who am I, really, compared to the center of the solar system? And what could I do the day the Sun decides to collect you? What will I do the day my world ends? Will I warm my hands to mold Death’s grimace from your cold face? Use leftover clay to stuff cracks in the atmosphere, and force the universe to share its last breath with you? No. I am a poet, but I am a coward at best, so I wash my hands and premeditate a nonfiction piece of a world so uninhabitable I will inherit the title “Sculptor.” This is a universe crafted with words in the shape of you, in spirit or in chalk. I will try not to 157 Title of piece balk when the stars blink at me like defibrillator machines. I stare back through the pitch black, wondering if this is a sign to warm my hands to write, wondering if Grief will perform a mimicry of mercy in a dream— the conformation that I will write my best man speech before I write her obituary.