Ear Ghosts
Noa Micaela Fields

I picked up the phrase “ear ghost” from a Dennis Cooper novel,  Try—the lingering resonance of noise or music as haptic after its physical presence recedes, a palpable disturbance felt even in silence—“how, like, even after it’s off, loud music, especially guitar, hangs around in the air tinkling faintly for two, three seconds”—an inescapable  punctum-like punk gesture that becomes a suspended punctuation mark—do you hear it? do you feel it with your whole body?—which might also speak to bodily dissociation, hauntological traces or bruising afterlives—outside the order of respectability, a DIY invitation into noise as abjecthood and/or dissonance-dissidence. So I offered this found phrase as a prompt, and this is the fray that emerged on the page—acoustically vulnerable and chemically disorienting, fragments fumblingly undone. Get lost in it… 

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Noa Micaela Fields is the author of E (Nightboat Books, 2026), an alter-book embracing mishearing as a ritual of transformation. Beyond the page, her poems take on embodied form in ritual-performance remixes; such ethereal access mischief has recently transpired at the Palais de Tokyo, Artists Space, Poetry Foundation, Elastic Arts, Poetry Project, and Wrightwood 659.