On a Field in the Present

Abstract

On a Field in the Present David M. de León (bio) I was walking through the woods and was notthe woods but one walking, thinkingof the other side of the woods, where I was fromand not through the woods, where I was headed — a dropped stick in the dirt there wasa photograph of my grandmother I remember,a black-and-white of a yellow kitchen,and that exposed rock was the gloss paint on the walls of my school, and this stripped treewas that kiss on the steps that came onsurprised and scary. But how was I always herethat these things would wait for me? No, I came to this place with trees like constellationsand thought it was myself. But look,there’s another rock which isn’t my schoolbut my old house, or the crickets in the field that stole my sleep, or the dreams I had of hidingand I am hiding in a rock by a ledgewhere a storm tore the roots out of the groundand they hung dangling, crying mud but now the rock moves and the tree liftsand the woods rustle in a swarm and I stagger like a cliff. [End Page 199] David M. de León David M. de León is a Puerto Rican writer, academic, and theater artist from New Jersey. Creative work has appeared in or is forthcoming in places like [PANK], Acentos, Fence, DIAGRAM, Strange Horizons, Bat City Review, and 2River View. His poetry manuscript was shortlisted for the Dorset prize at Tupelo Press and the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize at Pleiades, and was a semi-finalist for the Andres Montoya prize. Currently he is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Yale. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades Press