Mel Ruth

Memento Mori

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s …
mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment
and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

--Susan Sontag

And yet there you sit, chin
propped on hand, elbow resting
on arm. Grandmother, I wish
to remember you like this, eyes
scintillating and mouth cocked
with happy ease. Every day, one
less haunting. Until the dreams
come, pale blue hospital gown, dirty
head cap, cheeks hollowed and held
as if the air is constantly exiting
your body. Once alive, but already
dead, body biding its time while sepsis seeps
and sinks, spreads like blood
on a paper towel. Sometimes
it’s the things we can’t see that cost
us the most. Sometimes it's the things we can
see that bite the heart hardest.

Mel Ruth has pieces published or forthcoming in journals such as South Carolina Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Southern Indiana Review, and more. Her chapbook, A Name Among Bone, was the winner of the 2021 Cow Creek Chapbook Prize and was also listed as a semi-finalist in the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Contest. She is a former PhD student at Georgia State University.