Joanna C. Valente Body Within Body The lights turned off and the sea wasn't outside your window. The G train screeched to a stop, the conductor not you said there are aliens with you when you sleep. At 5:30 AM someone comes into your bedroom and they are not alive but you are not scared even though you should be and you have sex the way a ghost would but you are not a ghost. Before you get up, you ask, how does dying feel? Maybe it's easier to eat a dead corpse than to build a new human so now you understand the use of color in a Monet, the same way to deconstruct a building, quit a job, masturbate in the arms of a girl you love but haven't told her you love her yet. You hear someone say living is the energy of someone else's memory, like that time you went to the Museum of Natural History with your dad and both of you walked from exhibit to exhibit trying to study humanity before humanity existed, before manic panic could turn brown hair blue, and what does it even mean to be American but not American?