Slammed Open
Summer lightning washed
halted breath,
her throat a rebellion,
mouth opened wide like the glare of God.
Whirled, key turned, blue light
was fine, this time
calling secrets
three hours after,
kept in a flash.
Long and ugly, the looped matrix
fell cleaning, pungent. Time hitched
an invisible rave,
an angel,
a sword,
an idea—
daughter, in a long letter,
close the blood, let it be divine.
Teeth Clicking
Gas opened the street at a stroke,
seven minutes before softer girls
worked with wooden horror.
Calls drifted into an invasion,
the graveyard formed white nightgowns
as if pajamas had been funny—
see it lying, a riptide of sky
praying easy, an abyss dirty in her throat.
There was no answer—and why not?
Lightpoles bloomed into dances,
as if the daughter will make this
as brief as possible.
The spring was home when time
decided to glow in the corner,
pounding and cold on the fire.
You just went. You tell it
in your own way.
A Great Burning
I guess I turn on easily—
barefoot and laughing while
their dresses scream
sweet soul music.
Empty, nothing changed,
and, trapped, the word
echoed under thumb.
Yes, metal daisies strung
all over the throne tasted
iron. It was raining.
Eyes trace transfixed—
let them all look, power
dazzling, purple burning
just below a full skirt—
conscious thought lost
That mural collapsed,
some obscure town,
just a moment, catching
fingers across Main Street.
My heavy metal twisted back,
exploded upward, hit the street.
In a cruciform pattern,
heart beating, I was trouble
a radio transmission shouting
and on fire. A riot, sure of anything
E. Kristen Anderson is the author of seven chapbooks 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), 17 DAYS (ELJ Publications) ACOUSTIC BATTERY LIFE (ELJ 2016), FIRE IN THE SKY (Grey Book Press 2016), and SHE WITNESSES (dancing girl 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 her next anthologies, HYSTERIA: Writing the Female Body and COME AS YOU ARE (a 90s pop culture anthology) are forthcoming.
**These three poems are erasures taken from Stephen King’s Carrie (1974)