Wake for Memory
The full room
Dead mouths
In the hour where first words circle the crows
Dead mouths
Before the pillow burns with silence
The vase of flowers keeps its body still–
still
it’s a moving line when the lights of a lost car float
upon the clean walls – the moon drops and rises far beyond
the last of white things–
dreams speed up
dreams speed up
Near the garden’s walls the feral tail unfurls
a moan curls into the moon’s tear
before memory’s dead mouth is sewn up
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a Cave Canem Fellow and received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She was a 2006 finalist for the Naomi Madgett Long Poetry Award. Her poetry, fiction, and photography has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Puerto Del Sol, Gathering of the Tribes, Inkwell, Harpur Palate, PMS: poem memoir story, Saranac Review, and many others.