Preservatives (a film)

2025 Spring

‘Preservatives’ was a poem originally written for a reading with Stillroom Sessions earlier this Spring. However, upon reading this unedited version, Aris Solomon beautifully translated it to film and sound, giving the piece another life.

You can watch the short film here. 

Narration transcript below:

There is a man who addresses time 

Like a sea otter in waves 

Another who crashes

Like porcelain plates 

Suffocating in sea foam

The third man dives, despite tide.

Threading himself eternally in the blue.

Willing swollen sand grains

until a pearl emerges. 

Asking for nothing. 

This is hope.

To have hope is to have a metal pole

grasped between sweating fingers

in a swampy Spring lightning storm.

The pain of steadiness.

Grinding teeth,

like the wooden jaws of our forefathers. 

Unwavering seed.

Herds of sunflowers.

Sedated by their own perfume.

Throw the temperature of your eyes.

So far that they boil over.

So the candy shell cracks. 

So to acknowledge the green in the grass.

The freezer burn is flaking. 

The holy ones awaking. 

The stars spit on us for missing the point.

Still existing in still rooms of the colorless, 

preserved.

The muzzle of Winter has subsided. 

The sun screams.

Its kerosene breath

igniting the stillroom of Spring. 

There is a pantry on Chalcot Square. 

Houses in a row;

Yellow door, pink house, blue house, purple door.

Preserved and pickled. 

They are frosted tea cakes. 

A delicatessen of stale emotion.

The world happens, and still, 

they remain in this room.

I sense an uneasy nature.

An apprehensive hand cupping the atmosphere. 

Humidity gaping through 

its unsealable fingers. 

Waiting now,

for the ambush of stillness.

A glance, from the next room.

From another dimension.

We stargaze at a future that’s only liquid ice.

Filled with glittered crickets. 

Transforming to dismal clouds of fruit flies.

The kind that prey on spoiled ideas.

The kind that prey on the lack of preservatives.