Everyone Must Leave Something When

It was Maria who told me George Wong had died. I had not heard.

And we both agreed

It was sad.

He was neither bad man nor a good one. Just a person.

One morning, as he ripped two sachets of sugar into the machine coffee I made him, he said:

If there is something you want to change and you can, just change it.

I looked at the length of the ash on his cigarette end, nervous about where or when it would fall.

Just change it, girl. He flicked it on the floor,

maybe saying to the lime cordial:

Not everything you learn by heart is a poem.

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Faye Griffiths is originally from Manchester, England, but has lived in Colombia, New York, and currently lives in Xi’an in China. She likes to write poetry about small moments in real lives, the tension between the seemingly inconsequential and the important.