Unlike the roach whose body collapses under my hand,
the gnat disassembles.
Their bodies dot the walls of our apartment.
A few spin above our heads at night.  Lynn says “like a halo.” 

She believes death seeps.  It doesn’t scare her.
She watched her grandfather laid up in the family room.
Filled with the sun’s light,
the bag of intravenous fluid 

made a face as wrinkled and deaf as his. It attended him.
The two yelled back and forth.  It wasn’t Mandarin,
so she can’t remember what they said.
A village dialect, it sounded like gossip.