“untitled still life (2019)”
I don't want to give names
to your fistfuls of hollow
coffee cup still half full, overturned
baroque broken words, reaching for something
that forever seems older
than you or I in every language
well run dry, and yet
despite yourself
each moment in atemporal space
teeming with life
when we met, I
wanted to drink myself into the ground,
an inelegant death like hemingway perhaps
after bleeding worlds onto ten thousand pages
inspired by black coffee and gin
I'm sober now and you're still empty glasses,
the smell of pages, wine
and cigarettes after two years of silence
I can still vanish into the liquor darkness of you
without ever tasting a drop
I don't want to die anymore
(most days)
and perhaps I am a fool
for wandering through your still life fortress of
melancholy
but you keep coming back to me,
three hundred year old moment
or perhaps you are a memory
I've never been good at untangling how I feel
and some days I feel like I am made of iron
but today I feel like nothing more than glass -
Allēna 3/1/2026
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