What Of Us Remains

“We talk flowers into contusions.”

What Of Us Remains sorts through what a love leaves behind. There’s the photograph on her desk she turns face down, and a letter that confesses every night spent with someone else, then signs off I never think of you at all.

And what remains is physical. He holds her feet in his palm and glides over her like a river rock in running water. Moonlight slips through the blinds and gathers on her ivory skin like milk.

Two people are compelled to be good to each other and bad, and they spend precious time biting their lips before they speak.

For readers of Sharon Olds and Richard Siken’s Crush.

From the book

And swiftly
the shadows silenced
irrevocably
like the artifacts in museums
behind reinforced glass,
with blurred, unfocused eyes,
like love letters and calculations
in photographs.

The edition

48 pages. Collector’s first printing, limited to 100 hand-numbered copies, signed by the author. Cover design by Marco Fontanili.

The poetry of Eric Williamson

This Is Our Secret, What Of Us Remains, Where Silence Keeps You, And In Our Absence, and Before We Weren’t Anywhere. Read the titles in order and they follow one love, from the secret, to the empty room, to before any of it began.