Miranda Field is the author of two poetry collections, Imaginary Royalty (Four Way Books, 2017), and Swallow (Mariner Books, 2002), which received a Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and has received a Discovery/The Nation Award and a Pushcart Prize. She was born and raised in the UK, […]
Not eat the thing you took. Not pluck its feather, peel its skin. Not kiss your own face on the mouth, imagining the tasting. Nor bury the thing you bring down from the sky. Not interpret the meaning of its cry. Not clothe the cooling thing In woolens. Not reel it in. Not wind […]
If the tongue wags, caliper the tongue. The tongue delivers lashes. Buckle the mask to tourniquet the tongue. The mule-snout of the scold’s mask blunts the pointed finial tongue, the hasp-tongue back to loaf-shape, to shovel-shape, to food, to tool, to good machine, to tabernacle of intentional action. Not toy that wills itself to whirring […]
She shows me on her own long torso: how the metal plugs latch on, a little roughly, but not so sudden as to frighten the cow and stop the milk. The apparatus needn’t be beloved, it’s unequivocal, the sucking’s rhythmic, mechanical. This is how it’s really done on distant farms, in agricultural zones. A novel […]
Having fallen so far so very slowly demonstrating a type of patience only suicides have, a sacramental, steady, plodding fall, but also an aerating whoosh like no other— without precedent, the floor by floor descent— at bottom, do I find a bed? I do not. Coming too close to you, I’ve cultured desires to dive […]
Not sleep for sleep is like the wind and trees amazed by sleep’s persuasive gaze and germinates inside cicada cochlea— do not you sleep, do not you sleep?— then eats these hatchlings up, unseen. In glistening jelly themes hollower than Appalachian mines among pines, praise, applause, themes—my subtle worms—combine when […]
Above, it’s still rasining, pins falling, microscopic bells tolling among needles. The hill juts out a little from the cemetery, sheltered by cedars of Lebanon— neutral ground, not for the dead but for their visitors. If you opened the hill, you’d find no evidence inside of death, only, hovering above the opening, a folly, a […]
Mirror/skaters diorama. Night-time glass glows black, iron radiator’s hulk thrown back, dry air catches in throat, dark early, hundred-years sleep war begins, tundra bears down. Closest you get to actual ghost-hood: child’s body falls out of bed with a thud— corpse tossed in a ship’s hold. Closeted laboring, enlarged heart of the dark. This is […]