E. Kristin Anderson | This Is How I Am A Monster

E. Kristin Anderson is a multi-Pushcart-nominated poet and author who grew up in Westbrook, Maine and is a graduate of Connecticut College. She has a fancy diploma that says "B.A. in Classics," which makes her sound smart but has not helped her get any jobs in Ancient Rome. Kristin is the co-editor of Dear Teen Me, an anthology based on the popular website and her next anthology, Hysteria: Writing the female body, is forthcoming from Sable Books. She is currently curating Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture for ELJ Publications. Her poetry has been published worldwide in many magazines and anthologies and she is the author of eight chapbooks. Kristin recently took a position as Special Projects Manager for ELJ and is a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker. She now lives in Austin, TX where she works as a freelance editor and is trying to trick someone into publishing her full-length collection of erasure poems based on women's and teen magazines. She tweets at @ek_anderson.

E. Kristin Anderson' website.

Also by E. Kristin Anderson: Fire in the Sky She Witnesses: Found Poems 17 Days Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night A Guide for the Practical Abductee A Jab of Deep Urgency

October 19, 2016

E. Kristin Anderson

This Is How I Am A Monster

I gave all my fingers to one location, one singular spot in a small room where most of you won't find me. I wear gloves and you don't notice how digits draw down these counted strikes. The rain comes harder and I feel that burn on my shoulders. Electricity tastes my tongue like an old friend or a microscope. Electricity leaves a river running down my arm. I wished for this: How we lay, we lay, we lay like long, thin Ouija boards built by Parker Brothers to mimic the old tools of the soothsayers. Say, what witchcraft makes a mark? This devil sleeps in my throat like a sober companion. And irony is his joke: I am your Hollywood, your manicure, your temperature. I am the soft body that draws the deep, dark split of the harvest moon. Look how my closet vomits laundry into every corner of myself. Look how my dishwasher falls open, makes a home for anxious ghosts. Have you heard it? The siren song of the highway? I can't tell, anymore, who is singing, or why. So I sing, quietly, in bed and asleep, twisted in sheets and sweating out this fever. I sing his songs and your songs and these songs that crack open my monstrous heart and reveal a truth that I will not will not will not look upon. Here: tie this blindfold. Do not worry if my hair catches in the knot.