You, the Body & the Book

You lived with the body. There was no room for the book. You lived with the book, and the body broke a window trying to get in. You let the body stay the night on the couch and cleaned the cuts on its hands. The book said, I’m not jealous, but soon it begged for attention. At the poetry reading they both showed up and it was an impossible choice. In bed it was either the book or the body. At times zaftig, at times skinny. Neither of them looked better in the morning. You wiped their smudges after they got drunk and cried. Other books looked on smugly, cool and contained. They were all epiphany and apostrophe. The book made the body do impossible things, but only the body could bear another body and that was the question on the table. For a while you had very little to say to the book and worried the body was all you had.

From YOU (Coffee House Press, 2024). Reprinted with the permission of the author.