The Kill by Carl Phillips

I enjoyed this piece a great deal because of the poignancy in it. Sex can be both an outer body experience and as close to death as you can get and this poem confirms that feeling. Also, there is poignancy in what the speaker says about human nature and how and why a person is not willing to entrust someone else enough to have that death experience that sex can develop into. The speaker says, "We cleave most entirely to what most we fear losing. We fear loss because we understand the fact of it, its largeness, its utter indifference to whether we do, or don't ignore it."