the louderARTS Project

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, poet, novelist, and painter/photographer, is a MFA candidate in the Fiction program at Sarah Lawrence College and has a Masters in English Literature from the University of Delaware. Her work has appeared and/or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Gathering of the Tribes, Inkwell, Sable Lit Mag, x magazine, JMWW, and many others. She served as an Associate Regional Editor of Lumina in 2004 and has taught at Medgar Evers College as well as numerous creative writing workshops. She is the recipient of the 2004 Africana Homestead Legacy Award (First Place in the Short Story category) and also earned a 2002 Honorable Mention from the Hurston/Wright Foundation Award for her novel excerpt (Promise). She was awarded the 2005 Smith-Shonubi Scholarship to attend the New York State Writers Institute Summer Program and will complete a residency at Soul Mountain in March 2006. She lives in New York City.

Ode to the Gazelle While I Bathe on Sunday Evening
      --after Yusef Komunyakaa

Gazelle, you are mine. Your corpse
is pounded into music. We shift
chords in this clear pool of brine. The tears
curve like sharp fish ribs; the drum
under your heart I snow an orchestra
of birds. Your faces, ebony, brass, amber
and gold, I kiss. Bones slide down in the white
porcelain tub. You leap from the hunter,
your neck cocked to the hammer, the cry
inside your mouth like a soaring horn
freed from the trunk of a white tree.

O animal heart, I am you
this evening. Green water
makes the hide soft and rutted,
brown throat of a river. Gazelle,
my drum, you cannot die. I want to be
more useful than memory, after
the body is bathed with vinegar
in death.; I want to be more ancient
than language and hands. Nothing kills
the drum after the skin begins its new life
as a song. Yes, we were once
animals. We cannot die twice.

© Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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