2 August 2006 | Vol. 6, No. 2

Elegy for What Survives Inside the Body

by KEITH MONTESANO

July 2005

Guilt unraveling to its end, but there's no such metaphor…

friends drunk on vacation, pink dusk and alcohol clouding

everything in sight. New boyfriend, and a life, for once, in order.

Suddenly she's bawling, tells the entire story, like you do

when your world is unfamiliar, the hazy bodies lost in black.

It takes six years for the pieces to make themselves apparent,

age twenty-two—ending relationship after relationship,

remote sun, sand, gunmetal sky and night closing in.

September 2004

The flatness of Canton, Ohio: she wishes for hills, a jutting

of something. Cocaine in a vial, unbala