Elisabeth Adwin Edwards

Death wrote a poem, and I lost it

after a line by Elizabeth Willis


Not a room/

but a room 's absence/ like the impression/ of hips left in the easy chair/

of the mind/ Soon I will remember/ nothing/ how you

are here/ sitting in the upholstered wingback/ you loved/ on the bank

of a river/ How a bird is resting/ on one of your slender wrists/ A pair of birds

nesting in your silver hair/ All this is vanishing/

Forgive me/ even as I recognize/ I am losing what Death has made/ 

You who have waited/ are waiting/ were waiting/ you forgive me 

my forgetting

Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in The Tampa Review, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, Pedestal, Posit, and elsewhere; her prose has been published in CutBank, HAD, On The Seawall, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. A former regional theatre actor, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and teen daughter in an apartment filled with books. You can find her on Twitter at @EAdwinEdwards.