I Have Started to Look Around and Notice Still Lives [sarah broyles ledbetter]

There is one on our dining room table called

Still Life with Fruits and Vegetables Chosen Carefully

For Someone Other than Myself, and another

In the breakfast nook (unfinished) called

Still Life with Disposable and Partially Consumed

Items. It is the one we don’t want to add to

But keep adding to, while the other

Stays

Still.

There was another Still Life on the bed last night:

Mother Snoring with Child, and in another

Room, Woman Slumbers Fully Clothed on the

Last Fourth of the Bed in Black. 

All still. All life.

Down the hall, another one sits inside the author

Of this poem’s room, the title is Untitled.

It is a Still Life with Wet Swim 

Trunks and Fake Pearls and Poem (first

draft) on Folded and Refolded Printer Paper.

In the bathroom another one. Still Life with 

CVS Brush and Damp Towel, and Biting Cold Air,

And Beer Bottle.

In the kitchen, there is no Still Life.

The constant arranging and rearranging a sweep

Of successive logics and illogics and cravings

Brought by the collaborative who lives here,

Each in its own pocket of starlit abysmal space

Overlapping just this one time because

The anger, and the desire for 

Relief, to set

One’s things down permanently and not have

To move one’s limbs, are all too much.

We line up for sleep and only then do we 

Lie where we fall as the half moon stays a half moon

Only a little while longer. 

It isn’t true,

That everything changes. No. 

Every

Thing is in a state of revealing

Itself to be exactly What It Is.