The poem feels like someone waking inside a pain so familiar it has almost become a place, a landscape they know by touch alone. Its broken lines echo the disorientation of realizing you’ve returned to a hurt you thought you’d outgrown. The swords feel like old stories we whisper to ourselves to make the unbearable seem survivable. The blindfold isn’t about not seeing it’s about the quiet, frightened stillness of someone who has learned that movement can be dangerous. The “field of my body” is heartbreaking, the self turned into terrain shaped by storms it never asked for. Each wind she tastes carries its own memory, its own grit, its own history of apology. What wounds most is the tenderness of her excuses, the way she softens the very blades that keep her bound. The repetition “this field again” holds the exhaustion of someone who has woken in the same pain too many times to count. The final question trembles with the first spark of recognition, a moment where numbness cracks just enough for truth to slip through. And in that fragile opening, the poem becomes the quiet beginning of someone realizing they deserve to walk out of the field.
Dear Anna Laura, You have made the Swords card come alive. Talk about tarot layout. The way you set your poem on the page is terrific. When I first moved out of my house as a girl, I lived in a room over a bar & grill. The patrons beat the hell out of each other nightly, even throwing each other through the front window. The little Italian bartender would come out, lean over the wounded, and say, "Suffra. You no die." Well, if this divorce is eliciting poems like this, I say it's a blessing. Best Wishes, Rochelle
Anna, I’m a subscriber to the Cincinnati review and I remember reading your piece! I’m so glad I have the opportunity to speak to you about it.
Your use of spatial form and embodied metaphor are wonderful. I truly appreciate your control, discipline, and refusal of melodrama: which in my eyes earn you the structural disruption. I wonder if you’ve studied Claudia Rankine, because your experimentation with white space in this poem feels intentional in the same way it does in a lot of her pieces.
Your deployment of anaphora & repetition here are effective AND affective:
“once again waking in a field
… again”
This intentional redundancy mirrors the cyclical reality/disassociation of abuse while giving your writing this element of suspended time as opposed to immediacy.
I get the feeling that while the central metaphor, the “battlefield” could reference your speaker’s circumstance, that it’s far more likely you intend for it to correlate directly with the physical body. Which is all the more gut-wrenching when considering this line: “In the field of my body I feel each of the eight / winds distinctly” implying that violence has already occurred and is contained/internalized.
You show a mastery of parataxis “just kind of casually tied up. again”, where the flattened tone signals normalization, which hurt me as a reader much more than if your speaker had shown overt anguish.
But to me, the signature line of this work is this one:
“My excuse for each sword how it’s okay how he doesn’t mean it how he’s actually really trying”😭
It’s internalized coercive rhetoric. The speaker becomes the abuser’s advocate, and that kills me.
This is a phenomenal poem, and I’m so glad Substack gave me the means to tell you how I felt about it a few years later.
The poem feels like someone waking inside a pain so familiar it has almost become a place, a landscape they know by touch alone. Its broken lines echo the disorientation of realizing you’ve returned to a hurt you thought you’d outgrown. The swords feel like old stories we whisper to ourselves to make the unbearable seem survivable. The blindfold isn’t about not seeing it’s about the quiet, frightened stillness of someone who has learned that movement can be dangerous. The “field of my body” is heartbreaking, the self turned into terrain shaped by storms it never asked for. Each wind she tastes carries its own memory, its own grit, its own history of apology. What wounds most is the tenderness of her excuses, the way she softens the very blades that keep her bound. The repetition “this field again” holds the exhaustion of someone who has woken in the same pain too many times to count. The final question trembles with the first spark of recognition, a moment where numbness cracks just enough for truth to slip through. And in that fragile opening, the poem becomes the quiet beginning of someone realizing they deserve to walk out of the field.
this is such a beautiful observation — so lovely to see how it resonated for you. thank you for sharing 💙
Dear Anna Laura, You have made the Swords card come alive. Talk about tarot layout. The way you set your poem on the page is terrific. When I first moved out of my house as a girl, I lived in a room over a bar & grill. The patrons beat the hell out of each other nightly, even throwing each other through the front window. The little Italian bartender would come out, lean over the wounded, and say, "Suffra. You no die." Well, if this divorce is eliciting poems like this, I say it's a blessing. Best Wishes, Rochelle
Incredible
Oh, I LOVE this! I've always felt like the Eight of Swords. "Jesus this field again" . . . so true.
I like the poem very much. Eight of Swords is a powerful card.
Anna, I’m a subscriber to the Cincinnati review and I remember reading your piece! I’m so glad I have the opportunity to speak to you about it.
Your use of spatial form and embodied metaphor are wonderful. I truly appreciate your control, discipline, and refusal of melodrama: which in my eyes earn you the structural disruption. I wonder if you’ve studied Claudia Rankine, because your experimentation with white space in this poem feels intentional in the same way it does in a lot of her pieces.
Your deployment of anaphora & repetition here are effective AND affective:
“once again waking in a field
… again”
This intentional redundancy mirrors the cyclical reality/disassociation of abuse while giving your writing this element of suspended time as opposed to immediacy.
I get the feeling that while the central metaphor, the “battlefield” could reference your speaker’s circumstance, that it’s far more likely you intend for it to correlate directly with the physical body. Which is all the more gut-wrenching when considering this line: “In the field of my body I feel each of the eight / winds distinctly” implying that violence has already occurred and is contained/internalized.
You show a mastery of parataxis “just kind of casually tied up. again”, where the flattened tone signals normalization, which hurt me as a reader much more than if your speaker had shown overt anguish.
But to me, the signature line of this work is this one:
“My excuse for each sword how it’s okay how he doesn’t mean it how he’s actually really trying”😭
It’s internalized coercive rhetoric. The speaker becomes the abuser’s advocate, and that kills me.
This is a phenomenal poem, and I’m so glad Substack gave me the means to tell you how I felt about it a few years later.
Can anyone submit a poem?
If so, how?
Thank you
Hi Mark, yes, anyone can. Here’s our submissions portal: submissions.onlypoems.com
gut wrenching