Still Life with Fly

Shawn Stradley

Two concrete strips separated and edged by weeds

run between red brick walls, past a corrugated steel

garage door, bare lightbulb, crooked wood door, past

the weed patch of leftover space at the end of the dead

end.  Why there's a garage door alongside the alley

is a good question, no vehicle could make such a tight

turn.  Raised, the door provides ventilation, natural light.

Closed, it secures.  Inside, two dusty double-hung six-

over-six divided light windows look out to morning glory,

sow thistle, other brick walls, let in muted light, cast shadows.

For consistency and night, a couple of flood lights on poles

provide directed light, harsh and bare, or softened with a scrim.

Tea cups, angel wings, fabric, rusty train shock springs, spoiled

fruit, skulls––one human found in a basement among medical

school training supplies, one cat found in the corner of the weed

patch by the downspout, one beaver found by the river––old books,

empty vodka, whiskey, wine bottles. Mason jars filled with marbles,

fortunes, rocks, air, pennies, turpentine, thinner.  Dolls' arms, radio

tubes, bones––vertebrae, jaw, femurs from deer or cow––statues 

of saints, rosaries, forty-hour candles wrapped with prayers, used coffee

filters, condom wrappers, a shopping cart, mannequin torso, the ball cap

left by last Saturday night's trick, dead flowers.  Stretched canvases

lean against bare brick walls, too much accumulated amid the buzz of a single

fly.  The couch sags.  Open beer flattens.  There's not enough time to paint

it all out, step back, take it all in.  Turpentine rags stained crimson, violet, fern

and blue, used to clean brushes, wipe up spills, unstain hands, litter the floor

like jock-straps in a strip-club backroom––spontaneous, combustible.

"Still Life with Fly" was published in Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art. The personal breakthrough in this poem was derived from the concept that the next thing always belongs. If that is true, then why not keep going, keep adding? So I did. I’ve always been fascinated with artists' studios, the mess, the clutter, the curiosities, all the bric-a-brac, the inspiration. To me, these spaces have always held an air of potential eroticism. It’s all so exciting? Based on my many studio visits over the years, I imagined and I wrote, and I brainstormed, and I kept writing, and adding. In this case, even the gradual increase in line length keeps building to the chaos, the clutter, the potential. After the additions though, there is always the work of revision, grammar, sentence construction, flow, enjambment. Are these tools helping to build, helping to hold together? In a "kitchen sink"-type poem, I believe they have to.