E. Kristin Anderson
Every Twirl
(after Bree Sharp)
I fall asleep holding my breath on Halloween night with sirens howling, a song
buzzing down my street to catch in my throat. And I’m waiting for November’s
headlines but dreams persist and I’ve become a nightmare woman—asleep I feel
your sharp objects slicing my muscles like butter and in these dreams by the time
I find water the blood is running down my thighs and I remember that waking
won’t solve a thing until I can hold shattered glass in my own hands. And soon
I’d like to wear you like a wreath of white lilies. I’ll fold you up and put you in
my pocket. Tonight even the ants won’t collect their dead and if you’re making
every breath from my lungs a crime I’ll learn to be your undertaker. I can’t seem
to hypnotize a man, but I have shaken so many men like trees in a hurricane just to
see what might fall out. And maybe I smell like cheap perfume but you should see
how my hands are dirty from fishing for spoons stuck in the garbage disposal. How
my hair is dirty from a week of dry shampoo and anger. How after the rain steam
rises from the pavement and I find clarity and you find fog. You close your doors
to the bellwethers of freedom even as you point your rifles toward the sky and
celebrate. Every day we call our country She and like any other woman she chokes
in the hands of men who would genuflect at profanity. Who would find obscenity
between my thighs, find it falling from my mouth like a black widow spider and her
throng of children—throw your bricks at my moral decay, your fantasy, but as evil
as I am I know conspiracy from conundrum. So in any city I also know the time
it takes to untie your knots. I know what rot will come loose when your hands grow
too stiff to keep tying these knots anew. Wait for the crack of gunpowder to mitigate
your January crisis but I promise you’ve already met disaster. It’s just never grabbed
you by the legs and pulled. And while you genuflect before a virgin I’m learning
to dance again, to take every joy I am offered, to break the glass, to feel every song
like a buzz in my throat, even as my body mutinies. There is no girl who has ever
been clean and I invite the unclean to join me. Our poison is ours, is what we make
of it. So when I make my final exit, just tell the world I got on my broom and left.
I fall asleep holding my breath on Halloween night with sirens howling, a song
buzzing down my street to catch in my throat. And I’m waiting for November’s
headlines but dreams persist and I’ve become a nightmare woman—asleep I feel
your sharp objects slicing my muscles like butter and in these dreams by the time
I find water the blood is running down my thighs and I remember that waking
won’t solve a thing until I can hold shattered glass in my own hands. And soon
I’d like to wear you like a wreath of white lilies. I’ll fold you up and put you in
my pocket. Tonight even the ants won’t collect their dead and if you’re making
every breath from my lungs a crime I’ll learn to be your undertaker. I can’t seem
to hypnotize a man, but I have shaken so many men like trees in a hurricane just to
see what might fall out. And maybe I smell like cheap perfume but you should see
how my hands are dirty from fishing for spoons stuck in the garbage disposal. How
my hair is dirty from a week of dry shampoo and anger. How after the rain steam
rises from the pavement and I find clarity and you find fog. You close your doors
to the bellwethers of freedom even as you point your rifles toward the sky and
celebrate. Every day we call our country She and like any other woman she chokes
in the hands of men who would genuflect at profanity. Who would find obscenity
between my thighs, find it falling from my mouth like a black widow spider and her
throng of children—throw your bricks at my moral decay, your fantasy, but as evil
as I am I know conspiracy from conundrum. So in any city I also know the time
it takes to untie your knots. I know what rot will come loose when your hands grow
too stiff to keep tying these knots anew. Wait for the crack of gunpowder to mitigate
your January crisis but I promise you’ve already met disaster. It’s just never grabbed
you by the legs and pulled. And while you genuflect before a virgin I’m learning
to dance again, to take every joy I am offered, to break the glass, to feel every song
like a buzz in my throat, even as my body mutinies. There is no girl who has ever
been clean and I invite the unclean to join me. Our poison is ours, is what we make
of it. So when I make my final exit, just tell the world I got on my broom and left.
Biography
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E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. A Connecticut College alumna with a B.A. in classical studies, Kristin’s work has appeared in many magazines including The Texas Review, The Pinch, Barrelhouse Online, TriQuarterly, and FreezeRay Poetry. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press) and is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked the night shift at The New Yorker. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on Twitter at @ek_anderson.
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