

“The Two Elizas,” 2009, by poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths
(after ‘Two Fridas,’ 1939)Be near me & tell
where the blood is going.Too often bull-bellied clouds slow
drag our hips, fracturing
both girl & woman.Barbed ideals conjoin
& coil their righteous dreams through
arteries, thick as autumn vinesthat keep light out. And I must take
my own hand, must hold my own
hand, as if it were a stave of notesscattered from a razed moon: brokenly beating
the rhythm of a thousand-throated
hummingbirds beneath a dress of tulle.Listen to us: these women
say to ourselves: Eliza: Eliza.The men have left & in a dusky corner
the women you have been
are piled like a beige heap of slips
to be ironed & mended, hung.All mothers have left you
& in their shadows blood
drips from the chandelier
to the floor where your body
rocks in its cradle.Eliza: you: Eliza: me.
Which if I’m answering
each of youthere’s light in my lungs
where screams are smearedI wear golden lamps
that open after midnight.Four lips of light opening towards
testament & earth. Our imagination
& plague.The things that hold.
Hold me now
before I am no more
of a fragment
than the clouds behind me.The body expands
its luminous stain.Melancholic now, one Eliza.
Inconsolable: you: the Others.Be near me & tell
us where the blood is going.Be near me & tell Beauty
I was once unbearable.
For Elizabun.
265 notes“The Two Elizas,” 2009, by poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths (after ‘Two Fridas,’ 1939) Be near me & tell...
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