Back to Issue Twenty-Six.

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.

 

Theis Anderson is a poet and student of English Literature at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Their work has featured in Magma Poetry, Menacing Hedge, and Poetry London among others.

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