Hui

By Benjamine Mo

In this sermon, everything is but its ending. And this ends with me as it did with you just weeks ago, when I saw you off on the service road and sun-hatted aunties picked highway onion grass, unflinching. All of this is to confess that what I’ve inherited from you is words to place but nowhere to put them, that the ending is unbirthed, picked too soon; that I’m re-ending things without exhaling, an unnatural state. Languages of punctuation that we never got right. But I’m speaking now to the cooling streets and fog of masked faces, to the bending of already curled onion grass, and I’m speaking a eulogy that I resuscitate and live: that you, precious, were here, that some part of this ended just weeks ago as stalks were bent and basketed, and I cried with Mama over a photo of you descaling fish. The mass-masking isn’t quite over yet, but I bare this face that shares with you its eyebrows, telling on myself, telling myself, in words: though everything is but its ending, the stalk will regrow; this sermon is unceasing