E. Kristin Anderson

Pillow, Screwdriver

You wanted me there—wide-eyed
on the kitchen walls, odd and white and

dangerous. I’m telling you, there are moments
when I loved to thrash, a cyclone, a blue sky,

engine out into hungry thinking (sweet, sweet,
wrong). Morning just opened rock-and roll

and I light a sweet peach trying to kill this shroud.
I really believe you know your own gravestone,

laughing into night, a compulsory program
of fresh grief. I’m boiled down, out the window—

close to everything you’re going to get.

This is an erasure poem. Source: King, Stephen. Christine. New York: Signet, 1983. 23-26 Print.

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Prince fan, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She is the co-editor of Dear Teen Me and her next anthology, Hysteria: Writing the female body, is forthcoming from Sable Books. She is working on Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture. Kristin is the author of seven chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), She Witnesses (dancing girl press), and We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). Kristin is an editor and designer at Red Paint Hilland was formerly a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on twitter at @ek_anderson.