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Can’t we put them all there


It had been a long time since I’d been to the ceiling. It’s like the Empire State building for New Yorkers—you could go there anytime, so you don’t. I leaned the ladder against the wall, checked the rubber grip of the feet and set off, lickety-split. Before long I’d arrived. The ceiling was as I remembered it—clean enough but somewhat desolate, the angle where it meets the wall long and empty as a hospital corridor. I brought roses along as a small apology. Apology accepted, the head nurse said, going to hunt down a vase. It’s the least I could do, I said, you know, if we can put a man on the moon.




Sarah Sloat

levelheaded: Can’t we put them all there


“It” is an interesting word. “It” has a democratizing effect on objects. “It” can be anything “it” wants to be. Take the first sentence of Sarah Sloat’s prose poem: “It had been a long time since I’d been to the ceiling.” Here, “it” is used as a dummy word, making the sentence seem colloquial and unassuming. But the “it” here is empty, meaningless, and opens the poem to possibility, namely the possibility of its premise: a strange trip to “the ceiling.”


The blankness of the poem’s initial “it” (and the temporal ambiguity of “has been”) foreshadows the weird openness of Sloat’s poem. The poem sniffs around the edges of surrealism/symbolism, so even if “ceiling” and “hospital” and “roses” do not rise from their dream-logic into a perfectly executed metaphor, they almost automatically seem like representatives of something outside the poem. Moments like the “lickety-split” of the third sentence signal a shift in the mental procession of the poem in which we are moved from exposition to a kind of onomatopoeic colloquialism (then back to exposition). A similar shift occurs when the nurse speaks. Suddenly, the speaker is in a hospital having a gibberish conversation with the head nurse (“head” nurse, perhaps?). These shifts come out of nowhere, and because prose poems waive the punctuating effects of line breaks, the changes become especially important to our understanding that impossible things are happening.


The strange occurrences in Sloat’s poem do not seem purposeless. Instead they coalesce into an imaginative parable. “Ceiling,” “hospital,” and “roses” may not adhere perfectly to concepts outside the poem, but there are aspects of concreteness that root the poem in a natural, traditional sense of narrative. By “check[ing] the rubber grip of the feet” this speaker indicates her interest in self-preservation. She proves cautious. By bringing roses as a “small apology,” she indicates her potential for empathy. This kind of characterization may be uncommon in poetry but is appropriately consistent with prose. And the poem is a story in a most ancient sense of the word “story” in that it is a story of a journey—a very short journey up a ladder.


Like its initial “it,” Sloat’s poem holds itself at arm’s length from perfect comprehension. It is ultimately bendable, open for interpretation. Interpretation itself can be tedious, but if you’re interested, start here: the ceiling is something that is almost always above our heads, and we almost never go there, and when we do arrive, an apology to a nurse may be warranted. Make of that what you will, but “if we can put a man on the moon,” why not?



–  The Editors




levelheaded: reader comments


“I so much enjoyed the prose poem ‘Can’t we put them all there,’ by Sarah J. Sloat, and your levelheaded comments about this surreal trip to the ceiling. It’s wonderful to see such close reading of the poem, and the brief touches of interpretation, as when a balloon floats up and glances off the…ceiling…bobbing around. As an innocent bystander/reader, I witnessed the rose-bearing ceiling visitor as someone who has been here before, a pretty long time ago. It isn’t shown as a glass ceiling, but that occurred to me in the dangerous interpretation place, since it would be hard to rise that high and no higher for such an arbitrary reason; I’d stay away, too. I love the ‘rubber grip of the feet’ of the ladder—so real world, such a safe way to get up, and to get back down.”



Kathleen Kirk LevelerDotSmallAligned




“Reading ‘Can’t we put them all there,’ I couldn’t really make heads or tails of what the speaker was trying to portray at first. Reading it a second time, I almost thought that the word ceiling should be capitalized; it seems such a real place in the prose, a destination. I got a feeling of regret mostly however. The roses and the apology to a nurse, as well as the opening where the speaker references the Empire State Building are distinctly reminiscent of a person who keeps meaning to visit a grave but never makes the time to actually do it. I almost get the feeling that she gave something up and, unable to recover it, all she can do is honor its memory—something she’s neglected to do for quite a while.”



Brooke Boatman LevelerDotSmallAligned