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Fieldnotes

Adele Elise Williams | Poetry

right before my nana died i bought

her a neko case cd. nana clung to music

like a mother’s neck when her mind dipped out

and her body went to town on tunes.

nana was a fucking riot and ya know what,

i’m rioting too. i’m spending

$120 on SKIMS. i’m filing my nails

into anti-lyrics. i’m bracket-shaped and art,

snatched all over, a field

all skinny-fat and assed.

think about anything possible,

then put impulse on it. that’s your field.

when nana died i was absent like bunnies.

i was losing somewhere spangled, throwing

it all away for trouble, for thirsty allure.

i posted queries on reddit. i slathered

my face-leather in hyaluronic acid,

in aloe. i drank drink. i squatted. i sunned.

OH fields, let’s consider frost. think birches.

think snow-roads. think desert places.

OH frost and your filthy woodpile, your murderous

shovel, taking all the fields for your own

melodramatic man-performance.

what about hans solo and his sci-fi field?

how about rick flair’s meadow-spectacle (wooh!)?

tom hardy all grassland and thick-dicked—

men on men in fields in fields in fields on men.

what about how i’m attracted to toxic masculinity?

how i want a mean man to lose me in his acreage?

OH we’re in territory now. we’re risky

and it gets so much riskier. it gets brown butter,

it goes tightrope. well you should know

that nana never even opened the cd,

that nana remembered me tilled

when she died, remembered me pasture,

if at all.