The field is a face, its teeth black crows. A dog barks like chopping wood, and wheat shivers. A woman with branches for arms and legs lurches like light through a broken window, seeds and salt trailing from twiggy fingers. I can’t describe the scene without wild gestures, which the analyst notes without creasing her blank mask. She—and by this I mean both the stump woman with gnarled limbs and the almost incorporeal analyst, because there is little to distinguish them at this point—hands me a shovel and commands me to dig. I turn my back to the judgmental sky and cut deep into the field’s weeping eye, with its scent of wet dog and woodsmoke, my back breaking with the weight of forty years of sky. Years pass, though I’m not sure in which direction, and children gather round, crow-pecked and curious. Some things grow, says the wooden woman, her roots at the point of piercing my raw hands. Some things die, says the analyst, removing her mask to reveal knots and carved initials. A silent dog places its paw gently on my shoulder. My time’s up, but I’m not going to stop digging now.

Oz Hardwick

is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “a dozen or so” full collections and chapbooks, including most recently with Hedgehog Poetry Press: Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (2024) and My Life as a Time Traveller: A Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (2023). His manuscript Orion Highway won the 2024 Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize and will be published by Dalya Press in 2025. His book Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry.

With Anne Caldwell, Oz edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022); and with Cassandra Atherton, he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press, 2024).

By day, Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK). In his spare time, he is a respected music journalist. He has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the Arc Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.”

Author’s website: www.ozhardwick.co.uk

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A New Home Beneath the Stars, a prose poem in Flash Glass (1 May 2024)

⚡ Oz Hardwick, seven prose poems in The Mackinaw (Issue 1, January 2024)

⚡ Five Stunning Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick in Lothlorian Poetry Journal (23 April 2021)

⚡ Dislocations: Five Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick in Inverse Journal (6 February 2019)