Still Life with Zoloft
by Kim Peter Kovac
Sun zeniths behind cloud cover
and the vibrating fog expands,
throbbing with pockets of red-
green and blue-yellow, forbidden
colors visible only when brain-
chemicals weld opposing retinal
neurons so they can’t cancel out.
The air starts turning brittle,
a sound like drying glue
crackling out a percussive beat
that segues from seven-four
to a sub-Saharan polyrhythm,
conjoining the trees to ground.
The landscape looks like anxiety.
Kim Peter Kovac works nationally and internationally in theater for young audiences with an emphasis on new play development and networking. He tells stories on stages as producer of new plays, and tells stories in writing with lineated poems, prose poems, creative non-fiction, flash fiction, haiku, haibun, and microfiction, with work appearing or forthcoming in print and on-line in journals from Australia, India, Ireland, Dubai (UAE), England, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, and the USA, including The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Red Paint Hill, Elsewhere, Frogpond, Mudlark, and Counterexample Poetics. @kimpeterkovac – www [dot] kimpeterkovac [dot] tumblr [dot] com
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Still Life with Zoloft”? In the Fall of 2018, I was diagnosed with a moderate level of Clinical Depression – I’m much better now with treatment and it’s under control. At the time though, I was sharing the information with a number of close friends via email, and I kind of dropped a line at the end, that I was in process of writing a poem called ‘Still Life With Zoloft’. To be sure, I was NOT actually writing the poem – it was only sort of a throwaway bit of (I hoped) humor. Well, several wrote and said that sounded fantastic, so I decided to write a poem to fit the title. The first line that came to me was the last line, knowing it had to be the last line, and the rest came very soon after. Any number of medical types I’ve read have said that writers can often articulate their own flavor of depression – especially poets – because they deal in metaphor and image.
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