In Their Own Words
Ansley Moon on “Field Studies”
Field Studies
1. Field. Filed. Fled.
2. This is a field of tiny bones, all girls.
3. Beyond the field is a small pond/river/body of water. Where the mothers take the bonegirls & return alone.
4. There is an art to drowning.
5. A field is an open expanse of land—a grave.
6. First you must submerge the body. Best if head underwater.
7. A river—a bed of sediment, water, & death.
8. You must be prepared to hold the baby girl asunder & not let go.
9. Do not let go.
10. You must be prepared to fight.
11. If you return with the girl, he will beat you & then kill you both.
12. You already know: survival is not made for two.
13. The hardest part will not be the water, but carrying your limp bonegirl back to the field.
Reprinted from Register the Missing (Kaya Press, 2026) with permission of the poet.
On “Field Studies”
At a Kundiman retreat, the poet Patrick Rosal shared the following poetry prompt:
Think of a field — imagined or from memory. You can describe the field, but I’ll suggest another challenge: Write down all the rules of that field.
For years, I had been trying to write about my adoption and family separation as well as the gender-based violence in India. A place where between 50-100 million women are “missing” due to gender based violence and infanticide. Each time I read about another missing girl, my chest constricted. What does a poet do with so much loss? What of my own “missing”?
For me, poetry often starts with a line or an image. In this case, two. I saw the field before me, but beyond that the water. The field was not an imagined place, but rather a place that felt like a memory, haunted. The “field” became metaphor for the impossible choices women in patriarchal societies are forced to make to save themselves.
The poem started as a prose poem, but in my revisions, I needed space from the violence the poem portrays. Upon revisiting the prompt, the numbered sections emerged as both a strategy to break up the violence and portray the rules of this particular field. This poem is, in many ways, an elegy for these missing girls, but also instructions for murder, but also instructions for survival. What choice does a woman have but to survive?
This poem is the first poem in my debut collection, Register the Missing, and it asks readers to imagine this world as it is. In the final line of the poem, we return back to the field, the site of violence. No one really leaves.
