Eastern Horizon
The morning isolated the water,
that ten o’clock eventually electrical
where the north gave birth to disaster.
And if we flash on a map, looping
through home,
light fell from the forest,
sirens, birds, harlots gone to windows
to watch. I slipped down and felt blood,
glittered all night, belly to the serpent,
midnight, the angel, the words.
I killed
atonement so glittering, let’s pray on
hands and knees, heart a big red muscle
and earth would be a thousand years
out the back door, music a deadly end,
swelling, crazed, hawked back, guitar,
drums, the neon twinkling for
the watchful town gone tonight.
Look out the window from miles away,
talk to chipped porcelain, wet reflection,
ancient mirror. Tell, tell, tell in the light
of the deep water.
Erasure. Source material: King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: Anchor, 2011. 245-259. Print.
Some Mythic Living Room
In damages, a mess at home,
another daughter could walk
in pocket. Nasty for you, aware,
first impression a faint frown—
never mind.
Half-truths yanking a firecracker,
rising a thin flush, the same umbrella
blew out short verse. I saved quiet.
I seem to dance. Wait for the drug
on the verge of change. Lights saw
some strange time traveler, a slanted
doorway to paper hearts.
What it’s like: a wave, a red cloud
over some Joan of Arc, trembling.
I stopped.
I touch gold.
Sheathed, hateful,
the nice girl plans to grin each time
they get away with it. I guarantee
a fucking calendar in black felt pen.
Erasure. Source material: King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: Anchor, 2011. 80-91. Print.
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E. Kristin Anderson is the author of seven 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), 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, 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 this year. She has worked at The New Yorker magazine and has a B.A. in Classics from Connecticut College. E. Kristin Anderson just began working as a designer and editor at Red Paint Hill and was a poetry editor for several years at Found Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in many magazines—including The Boiler, Nashville Review, diode, American Journal of Nursing, and Asimov’s Science Fiction—and has work forthcoming in Strange Horizons and Whiskey Island. She grew up in Maine, lives in Austin, Texas, and occasionally blogs at EKristinAnderson.com.