by E. Kristin Anderson

I:

When I’m Empty


This is where I go nowhere, live in the home I have—
I see time as a tired burn and surrender these embers
to you. I’m calling inside the black and blue to give
it a twist. Here I’ll take a halo from that delicate wire

let it taste my hands. Disenchanted, I ghost the dance
try it on and lose my grip; here I find a life as passerby.
Pleasure is in these prayers. The same old heart, the rust
and again I’m waking up. Mend it: Give me loud tonight.

A ring of fire outside is my overdrive, my ghost
is one to pass through. My head is worth keeping
and two strangers turn to song and turn the screws.
And friend, I swear, I swear, the years fucking burn.

It’s a life of rope and wrist and here I open wide;
stuck spilling night, we know a lullaby understands.

II:

Two Strangers


Stuck spilling night, we know a lullaby understands
halo by halo into the years. Home is in your fire,
a whisper for yesterday—here I’m waking up loud
and sick with overdrive. I let my rage have the stars.

Blame it on confession, damned and disenchanted,
the bearer of bad news waiting on the motorway
The ruse starts breaking up, dreaming just to hide
I let down my sleeve. I’m part death and part sky

waiting for the chance to burn through grace.
We breathe, we breathe low and long, feel the rope
of a delicate world, give it a twist, pray in the rust.
I turn over the years, they keep coming back up.

Wheel out the sun, chase it deep in the heart of a friend
I twist and disappear in the dance, breaking the road.

III:

Let It Turn


I twist and disappear in the dance, breaking the road
keeping back the strangers in their masks, the embers.
You’re spilling over me, a ring of sky for growing old
and I can choose to taste the ghost; we breathe in years.

My ruse is a reason to bleed, my heart and wings apart,
everything I’m not spilling, spilling—a one-way flame.
Love is shame. And in my hand there’s a burn bright
enough for ignition—a new day rising down for one.

And I hate waking—a lullaby breaking at the wrist,
a vacant town for rust and song. I’m a little empty,
blues and stars the same, a taste around my screws.
I’m a motorway for the down and out—come play,

hold the rope one more time. We stand in the leaves—
this is where I go nowhere, live in the home I have.

Note: This is a found poem. Source material: Foo Fighters. One By One Roswell/RCA, 2002.

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E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and her work has appeared in many magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), We’re Doing Witchcraft (Porkbelly Press), and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Porkbelly Press. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on Twitter at @ek_anderson.

by E. Kristin Anderson

(after Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins)

If this isn’t chaos, it’ll do until chaos gets here.
—Brian Williams, The 11th Hour, October 16, 2019

It’s been almost twenty years since the first time I woke up knowing
the life I’d expected was a myth I’d transcribed on my ribs. Every year

spent wrapped in those telephone cords must have been a trick and
I’ve realized that I might be a relic, a fragile masterpiece to be collected,

to later collect her own dust. But because my heart still beats I’m always
waiting for a heart attack or an aneurysm and because I haven’t died

yet every time I turn on the TV I slip back into suspicion. I look for
the illusion, find another gun, swallow another wildfire. Now I collect

my intentions like seeds and bury them in the neighbors’ potted plants.
I’ll never be a thief but, yes, I might pretend. My best disguise is another

tube of black eyeliner. Another pair of secondhand boots. And every
morning I wake up sweating, wishing I knew how not to love. How to

pack up and leave—as if home is not something I’d have to cut away
with scissors. Today when I slice open another brown box from Amazon

it will be mostly filled with air. Tomorrow when I hold out my hand the men
who take it will give it a twist and as my bones snap they’ll ask for my vote.

One of these days I’ll run screaming from both the sacred and the profane.
Some hills are saintless. Still, I have to believe that this isn’t doomsday.

I look at the map again and realize I’ve walked right off the edge. I’m
a human being, even at arm’s length, even on my doorstep calling my cat

home. I’m all out of ghosts—do you know this sensation, knowing that no
phone call can keep you from locking the door on yourself? I’ve spent a whole

week telling friends to get a flu shot because anything else is too difficult
to say out loud. I’m trying to figure out when time became a trick, but

it turns out I’ve walked right off the calendar, too. Truth and not-truth spin
like the sweater you put in the dryer and, in the end, this is both nothing

and chaos, a crackle in the air. So when my phone rings I let it go to voicemail
and I let the messages pile up for days and days like leaves in a storm drain.

I am the ghost now. It’s the only way to survive a year without a single
slow news day. A year in which we cover all of our mirrors to stay alive.

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Based in Austin, TX, E. Kristin Anderson is the author of nine chapbooks, including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, 17 seventeen XVII, We’re Doing Witchcraft, and Behind, All You’ve Got (forthcoming). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time, she worked nights at The New Yorker.

by E. Kristin Anderson

(after Beto O’Rourke)

I swear I will scream until the bluebonnets               come back into bloom                    

    a river of birth      in the ditches on the highway       until the grackles fall     

            yellow-eyed          to perch on my arms,          throats open

        to cry a piercing anthem,                 to purge             the hurricane     

    around us          to pull the windows apart        from every home       so we might

hear      every single voice    the guitars hanging from the ceilings     and rocking

    on the floors        and I am a magnolia tree          older than the bees       and I still

welcome the bees      and the beetles        I have known forever           I am

             a magnolia tree                blooming           under a crescent moon        

a Texas moon         if there ever was one        to welcome the water      from the Gulf    

      the things we dare to hope        raining down         on the driest valley       a tornado

                     to wreck the myth of          The Border        to grind our fences to sand      

and I want to breathe that sand      into myself        into my mockingbird heart         

             a broken alarm      so loud against the buzz of traffic         on I-35      against

the beat of the wings of the monarchs            swirling toward Mexico      the winds

     of choice           whistling in every tongue that has ever          kissed the grass

          of my home          where a sunset      is a promise and a sunrise

is a whisper and a love song and         a fiddle and a violin        to tell you the truth

and the truth is my own hands      the glitter and the mud in my skin       it is the time

I was sick         in the ditch        where later primrose bloomed         alongside aster

        it is the blue of my tattered jeans         the blue of the newborn coyote’s eye.

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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.