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.