The Body Left Behind

The body keeps its own counsel. It wakes braced against something that isn’t there. It closes a hand around a throat that belongs to it. It goes on breathing after you have stopped being able to find yourself inside it.

The Body Left Behind collects pieces about bodily dread and the horror of occupancy — sleep paralysis, phantom sound, the fight you wake up already having lost, the thing you agreed to let inside you. Some of it goes where the permitted version of a life does not, and says aloud the part that is usually swallowed.

This is the most interior of the three volumes, and the shortest-breathed. The forms compress accordingly: prose poems, fragments, pieces that end mid-motion because the motion doesn’t end.