Day 1,000

Two weeks after her death
permission was granted
for her to cross the border
for medical care. She
was twelve. She’d
been born with Celiac Disease.
There were foods
she could eat and foods she couldn’t.
No reason she should have
died; it was just
that the feeding sites
had only the foods
she couldn’t digest. She tried
to eat them, grew sicker,
had to choose between
hunger and pain, sickness
and starvation. In the end
her body wasted away. She lost
a third of the growing she’d done;
then the rest of her followed.
In the end, the child
her parents buried
so easily slipped
into her place in the earth.
In the end they carried her
to her grave as they’d carried her
at four or five
into her bed, which, too,
like her body, had
been destroyed.