TWO POEMS
By E. Kristin Anderson
For medicinal use only
Prettiness fades, but a girl can
plant voices anywhere we want them,
make words up out of the air without temperament.
Jump out a window far enough,
crack up (down on the ground)
shake the forest— explosive in those guts.
Recognize our voices, remember
teenage monsters wandering loose—
slings and arrows scattered behind books.
A lot of us girls come back up here,
break before then, carrying the game:
I’ve seen that before someplace.
Twenty, twenty-five, thirty—
it’s just like a girl with guts may have to
break like midnight, the truth. Stand back.
This is a found poem using speech and quotations from the following source:
Duncan, Lois. Killing Mr. Griffin. Revised Paperback ed. New York: Little, Brown, 2010. 81-90, 92-94. Print.
Girls, Guts on the Floor
Wrapped up in naked pretty,
young young
blushing, I’m not
forgotten. I wanted to forget.
Lips bit off a lie,
over.
I was in my heels.
Magic looked at the living room,
silver gone out for the evening.
Girl: a jewel of selfishness,
velvet of subconscious,
enough, in love,
a fairy tale.
Lips clicked in silence.
Run. The key over eyes, all night,
I’m going to run. I’m going away.
Ladies take time; women take your picture.
I was a souvenir.
When this is over
you’ll go to bed
with a broken pencil
and a first-class dress.
This is an erasure poem. Source material: King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: Anchor, 2011. 180-191. Print.
E. Kristin Anderson is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry including A GUIDE FOR THE PRACTICAL ABDUCTEE (Red Bird Chapbooks 2014) PRAY, PRAY, PRAY: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press, 2015), ACOUSTIC BATTERY LIFE (ELJ Publications, 2016), FIRE IN THE SKY (Grey Book Press 2016), SHE WITNESSES (dancing girl press, 2016) and WE’RE DOING WITCHCRAFT (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016). Her nonfiction anthology, DEAR TEEN ME, based on the popular website, was published in October of 2012 by Zest Books (distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and my next anthologies, HYSTERIA: Writing the Female Body and COME AS YOU ARE (a 90s pop culture anthology) are forthcoming from Sable Books and ELJ, respectively. She's worked at The New Yorker magazine, has a B.A. in Classics from Connecticut College and is currently a poetry editor for Found Poetry Review and the new Special Projects Manager at ELJ. She's published poetry in many magazines worldwide, including Juked, Ambit, [PANK], Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cicada and has work forthcoming in American Journal of Nursing and The Indianola Review. She grew up in Maine, lives in Austin, Texas, and blogs at EKristinAnderson.com.
© 2016
