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.