Womanblood

Remember how to be human—that mouth

finer than shadows, (her) wild thought

something contagious. The sweet is secondary

to an old scar, a knowledge of the mirror,

a voice ripped from filaments of gold. Protest

the red, the ruins, the wrist—another gravestone

gripping (her) ocean, dark beneath the ailment

the air between the floorboards and the dream.

Come, mystified and afraid, fallen over out of

focus, that knife in the company of (her) lips

answers ready, a prayer fine across (her) forearm.

Rain-thinned, believe the trees, the garden, the girl.

This is an erasure poem. Source material: King, Stephen. Rose Madder. New York: Pocket, 1995. 307-317. Print.

Bone Sharp at the Shore

         (a golden shovel after Kesha)

Hold my hair back in the steady dark—hey,

you’ll remember I learned my most carnivore

practices from your bedtime stories. So you

can remember, too, a last bouquet of patient want

packaged and displayed in the window. Here my

viscera are just ebbing starlight where some meat

should be. So come, wait. You can count my teeth as I

launch them at the sea from open palms. Yes, I know—

I’ll plant my feet in sand, leave myself, and sink into it.

We Yield Nothing for Construction

        (a golden shovel after Kesha)

Come down clear to where I’m

on my feet, blooming and sick—

melt in the afternoon and turn and

wear this saltwater like skin, tired

of holding the tree line. Here—a ball of

string to find the horizon. I peel back the

sky like an orange rind, this singular mess

I can wash away with the loose coins you

find in my bed. See how America made

woman: hair in the sink, another rib in me.

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture and Hysteria: Writing the female body (forthcoming). Kristin’s poetry has been published worldwide in many magazines and she is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, Fire in the Sky, 17 seventeen XVII and Behind, All You've Got (forthcoming). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker.