Still Life

by Jessica Bolluyt

An October evening, she sits across from him

at a cafe table in the silver dusk and lamplight.

Mirrors catch their hands and faces and the stars.

In the tablescape of the sky, fallen leaves are

roving dice, rolling over and over

in indecision.

His canvas overcoat

obscures her white shoulders, an eclipse

and a shadow.

The bare relation of the sternum to the ribs

superimposes itself against the formation

of Orion's stars, and the steady stream

of small pairs of white headlights

becomes the ice-cube array of reflections in

the glass of water she raises to her lips.

The moon is an upturned sugar bowl, and

as the waiter arrives to take

the order - “Fossil teeth put humans in Europe

earlier than thought,”a headline drones -

pale astronomers drop like mayflies at their telescopes,

rendering the planet so nearsighted as to leave

an imminent asteroid unannounced.