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# Ode to the Rug on My Living Room Floor
- URL: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/literature/ode-to-the-rug-on-my-living-room-floor/
- Published: 2025-07-06T10:55:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-13T15:26:33.000Z
- Description: An intimate look at new and old love, with inherited memories and objects giving life to new ones in nuanced but familiar ways. The poem, rich in texture and sound, allows the reader to situate themselves in the love of once-new things, now washed in the fondness and grief of time passed.
- Author: Emily Sledge
- Tags: Literature & Poetry, Poetry, Issue I - Blue Winter, #Import 2025-10-08 13:07

**Ode to the Rug on My Living Room Floor**   
by Emily Sledge  
  
except that it isn’t even in my living room   
but an office in which we crust away at desks   
separate as the inch deep footprints   
nestled comfortably, permanently, on edges of sun bleached fibers  
  
my man brought the rug in by himself   
memories of a life etched before our time   
crunching as it unfurled, the rug opened   
a life for us to breathe in  
  
a life through fiber from the soft pile   
revealed by touches of oil, tears, food stains   
it will remember each step by carbon   
if nothing else remains   
  
his warehouse boots, my spilled ink well, the candles that light our foyer   
breeding an industrial gourmand   
the mingled scents moaning as if to say   
*I’ve been expecting you…come on in*  
  
drool of my lover’s mother   
she crawled on our inherited rug   
an infant with the curiosity of our cats   
whose litter litters the outskirts of this dirt-haven  
  
I sat in the corner of the aged rug   
where he loved me the night we first moved in   
stared into the keyhole of our bathroom door   
to where I wished we had  
  
my splintered ovary leaked atop wool flowers   
couldn’t move, felt like I’d been chained to a radiator   
all night the sounds of the shower underwritten   
by the light prose of his body   
  
I imagined myself as the hoarfrost on the inoperable window   
its clouded glass melting with the steam off skin   
the condensation reached the inner wool of my ears with a whisper   
*you can make this place clean* 

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*Emily Sledge is a born and bred bluegrass poet and screenwriter. She resides in Kentucky and is currently a graduate student at the University of Louisville.*