Waste

Everything that was young went quickly, the way his eyes met mine as soon as we woke together in a room outside Nanjing, feeling as if all the things that were falling would fall and make their thunder, leave us with the challenge of being happy, all the things that felt given when gifts were not just surprises, but what we knew, what we hoped to take with us to heaven, unbound by faults and sins, not deceived the way we were when the end came to what we knew of China, landing me here. I am a wish in the skies spun out from celestial space to be poor, to be covered with black skin, a felt quilt of a map with only one way to China — through pain as big as hogs squealing at killing time on black farms in Alabama — the noise of death, the shrill needle that turns clouds over to rip the air above the cities where people are young and all that is given is never taken away.