Sharon Du
Haining Funeral
My aunt’s sickness outran all language for it.
It’s this incense sky – red stars, purple smoke,
pellucid tines in my nose, which spooned
her out in the past year.
As if moonrise could still startle me,
they show me her skull
with its damp crater after the surgery,
like a storm sucking on a curtain.
I never saw the cancer. Just dreamt
of it in a metal bowl – its wildflower confusion
and bellied dark. Talus boulders, palsied cascades,
pepperwort, duckweed, ash-green pines.
There’s no such thing as too much power.
The doctors said it could have been fumes
from the garment factory she worked in,
or nothing at all.
So little here involves people, their inner pattern.
Just what bones understand of clouds.
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Image by Luke Tinker from Pexels
Sharon Du is a Han Chinese person who was raised on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are presently an international student studying at Yale Law School. Their poetry has appeared in Meanjin, Poetry Online, and Cordite Poetry Review, and their debut chapbook, Emergency Exit is forthcoming with Quarterly West.
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