Commended: Megan Cheshire, The Roots Have my Shape

Megan Cheshire

Commended - 2025 Tower Poetry Prize, 'Roots'

The Roots Have my Shape

I once peeled back the skin of a field,

just to catch what writhes beneath.

You’d think of a softness – a damp, earthen cradle curling into itself.

A thousand soft-fisted creatures clawing the dirt’s blind rind,

Sprawling and settling into the womb of the world.

But no.

All tendon-knotted spasm of thread and rot

Not seeking, but knowing. Not climbing, but claiming.

Silent and serpentine, tunneling the black unlit marrow, gnawing the loam with patient teeth

Splitting the earth’s sternum. Pressed into the soil’s warm, wet lung.

Do they ache? When they split their soft teeth against basalt,

when they prise the belly of the world apart, is it pain?

Satisfaction?

I call them roots – but that word tastes too clean.

They are more – the under-knowing, the slowgrind of the earth’s stomach

Baptising themselves in what we’ve discarded.

Tangled veins bloodless, looping through

old grief and wetter sins

A jawbone chewing the black air – a knot of something too alive to be still.

The roots have my shape – a skeleton of fibres – my spine spooling downwards

the arch of my ribs curling like fern fronds – not growing away,

but in.

Wearing my body’s blueprint, all backwards and wrong

Stretching my words taut. Into a scream.

If I were to dig –

(Not with hands; hands are too soft – give me teeth, give me nails,

something blunt enough to tear) –

Could I strip their sinews, trace each vein back to its heaving root-head?

Suppress its dark and decaying tongue, lapping life in its quiet violence of

persistence.

The roots take what I do not want, and grow monstrous with it. I tell myself “they are natural”

– a necessary swallowing. But what is natural about the way they pierce

the spaces between flesh and memory?

Their fingertips brushing the raw parts of me. Not holding but clinging. Tightening their noose,

binding me to the dark subterranean hum.

Hating them would be hating my blood’s own bloom.

When they take me whole, I will split at the waist, spilling all my untended years

into the black knot beneath.

To grow upwards is to defy the very thing that holds me. And isn’t that what love is? To know

you are rooted in something that might consume you, and will, to stretch toward the light?

I asked the root once, “What are you doing?”

It answered:

“Becoming. Still.”

And so I will fold myself down, one day.

Curl my body into the dirt, and know the roots have waited

For the prodigal body to come home.