Three Fields to Leave You
BY THEIS ANDERSON
Winner of the 2018 Adroit Prize for Poetry
Selected by Alex Dimitrov
My own undressing bores me
but it does not bore you. There is
an economics to this. Heliotrope: the
staging
of a pre-dawn field. Little
footsteps—4am—an even
snow. Somewhere
a daughter is
abjected. It must go on record
that such occurrences take
place, disproportionately, at
the centre of a field. That said,
there are fields we can
choose from.
In one
she has frozen to death.
[Paradoxical undressing: a phenomenon
[frequently seen in cases of lethal hypoth
[ermia in which, shortly before death, ind
[ividuals will remove all or most of their c
[lothing. Because of this, exposure casual
[ties are often misidentified as victims of
[a violent crime.
Another: plastic
forks. It is not unusual
to dredge one’s hands through
layer upon layer of
unspeakable
whiteness and find
something other
than wheat. To snap the prongs
from a brittler frame. To hold them
in one’s mouth.
The final field
is printless. Bare. She
melts it
inside-out.
