What do you do when the person

Who died left

You behind in

                                                                Their body?

When you don’t

Recognize these

Hands, these

People, this

                                                                Language?

I tried to ask if someone knew

What happened to her, but they

Did not seem to care she was

                                                                Gone.

Instead, however, they scrunched

Their noses at my confusion, fashioned

Their breathing after my gasping, rolled

Their eyes as I pleaded with them to

Stop whatever it was that brought me here,

Where she

                                                                Should be.

I would call this

An elegy for the Girl that

Used to be here, but that would

Mean that I would have

Laid her to rest

                                                                By now;

And in all honesty,

I don’t know that she would want

Me to be singing an

Ode to

                                                                All that remains of her—

And by remains I mean

I would be singing over

The vanity sink, every glance

In the mirror a viewing of the corpse,

Every trip back to my hometown

Now a

                                                                haunting,

Every trip to the doctor now a seance,

Now an awakening of a deceased that never speaks

And a possession that still needs to pay the bill,

Check her gas tank, and drive

                                                                home.

I don’t even know if

She knows that she is gone,

Or that I have slipped into Her place—

As though there was never someone

Else behind these eyes, puppeteering

Her joy,

Our body,

My anguish,

                                                                This poem.