Still Life Poem by Elizabeth Anne Martina Ryan

Spongey beer shells the brain's late noon
Close the window on the tortured cats' feudal sex
The cash register below rings like a phone
The weather inside's cold though outside's blue
away from other peoples' blur
Pop songs in imitation English prate and hustle
The flowers are new like plastic

Guitar's secluded jazz pierces the rain,
the white mist, as cities disappear, plate islands
cracking in the sink It takes me down its ladders
all my fallow desires his green-blue skin's
anguish and trial. And here the earth's soot

returns that drawer of worms
that mattock I kicked, bled
into the fourth death into your rig
these ranks of love that tweak and ruction
each collapsing prince and rocks

and console myself with murder's green chiffon hands
and shovel highly if grace's jot anoints
my head's dope and quandary jig the sticking water in its cup
remembering all our clanking trestles, instruments, switches, vaults, taps
and clag the blue Antarctic cremating all he digs
to skin these ghosts
Instead I had him like a brooch and charity and lies