Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Flora Field
—
All of the Prompts Fail Me
Despite my best intentions
I cannot get on board with the arbitrary.
This should be prefaced
with “these days” or
some other modifier of time.
For there was in the past
a time of great preoccupation
with objects. An interest in
even a need to distill them down
to their most fundamental parts.
And then taking those parts.
Adding them up and removing
and recombining until
something more could be said.
These days, I take nothing
to task. At the top of the stairs
in the small room I stare
at the objects around me
and beg them to take on
a meaning beyond their own.
Flora Field is a poet from Oregon. She holds an MFA from Columbia University where she was a Teaching Fellow. She is a runner-up for an Academy of American Poets University Prize, a finalist for the Robert Watson Literary Prize, and a Best New Poets nominee. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Pigeon Pages, The Greensboro Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.
