MEMENTO

In her apartment two months after calling 

it quits with her boyfriend 

it is January, night. She lowers the blinds 

and unhooks her dress, small puddle, 

stepping naked from the dark hall 

into the lamp’s cool circle of light. Outside 

it is snowing, she can hear the trees, 

crooked drag of dactyls, fingerbones

against the neighbor’s roof.

She takes the camera and poses before it,

turns, takes one picture after another.

Staring into the lens, no smile, into the 

face of her future self to say  

Dear bitch betrayer, sad lingerer on, 

look how beautiful I was – 

Adam Scheffler received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he is currently finishing his PhD in English at Harvard. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Rattle, North American Review, Sewanee Review, Conjunctions, and the textbook The Practice of Creative Writing. He is the winner of River Styx’s 2014 International Poetry Contest.