Thoughts on death and British architecture.
By: Theis Anderson
beneath the house, I found cedar smoke. unburnt carbon and pitch. it was difficult to see through, though I knew I was looking for bodies. the way you know things inhaling sleep, your love sustained though her face keeps changing; in sleep a face doesn’t matter so much—you know it’s hers. there is nothing wrong with burning rhododendron so perhaps I was wading through that, we have woods of it here and a tendency not to build basements (the national water table being ‘relatively high’) it’s effectively a reverse swimming pool trying to build a room like that. still, the rich do it, there’s a market in London for the subterranean cinema gym and pool one owner who admitted to building a “panic room” sustaining the cost of frost-zone, damp and its myriad excavations which persist at least as long as the house at least as long as the bodies I knew, as in sleep, to look for through woodsmoke, to walk its red stairs down into taxidermy, rerun. to find exhaustion there.
Theis Anderson lives in London and writes poetry. Their work has appeared in PROTOTYPE, Poetry London, Menacing Hedge and other places. You can find them on instagram @monasteries.