Name: Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
ISBN: 9781555978068

Diane Seuss

This volume of poetry takes its title from Rembrandt's painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer's troubled gaze. The collection shatters the notion of a still life, and presents the painting in pieces. With invention and irreverence, the poems escape their gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Details from this gallery of lives in shards hide more than they reveal, like fragmented memories, waiting until they are reassembled into a whole.

Poems

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

from I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise

mia sønderskov

i have lived in a painting called paradise, and even the bad parts were beautiful

on the hillside is Moon Cemetery, where the tombstones are hobnailed or prismed like cut-glass bowls, and some are shaped so precisely like the trunks of trees that birds build their nests in the crooks of their granite limbs (…)

(…) for it is a cemetery named after a moon and moons never stay put

some say it’s hell, and some say just another, bolder paradise

C. worry, the little sister in dress-up clothes, believing if she’s only alert enough she can detoxify the snake

you’ll always be in pain, / the doctor said, and yes, my legs would tell you / if they could talk, it’s true

There isn’t a Holiday Inn Express that can save me. Not a flight to St. Louis, which my granddad called Sink Louis, not even a flight to Los Angeles (…)

if we are children, we’re bare and unashamed, our hands on our hips, until we are shamed. like you, we enter the store. like you, we exit

he’s reading war and peace again, but this time from back to front, and so he refers to it, in his mind, as peace and war

and love, even when it’s guttural, especially when it’s guttural and married to suffering, which we trust 

all my life, i’ve been writing of it but not from it, directing a bare lightbulb at its profile so i may outline the silhouette on tracing paper. its gifts have been delivered to my door in an unattributable basket, food nameless but nourishing

(…) i saw that i could kill and i, too, would die

from Self-Portrait under Janis’s Show When She Sang “Ball and Chain” at Monterey Pop, 1967

if janis’s face was not pitted like the moon, then her face was only pitted, and there was no love to be had

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl Poems

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