E. Kristin Anderson

The Neighbors Say
(after L7)

What are the things we tell our sons while they burn down the houses of our daughters?

I throw another hospital bill in the trash and taste a small fear in the back of my throat.

When they come for me I’ll have nothing to give but my own red tongue. Nowhere.

I haven’t washed my hair in ten days. This is what normal looks like now:

twisting a braid in the mirror, lining my lips dark. I shove down any pride I held for family,

dig it out to invest in myself—a trite honorarium. At least when I got out of bed today I remembered

to leave the house. I smelled the garbage and the wildflowers and the laundry and the cars.

The nurse practitioner asks me to rate my pain on a scale from one to ten—but how do you rate

what you’ve learned to live with? It’s Father’s Day and my pain is an immeasurable thing—

dull and bright and simmering. I wear pettiness like I wish I could wear apathy: a necklace.

I’m greeted by a butterfly in the crosswalk. In my grief I shove the fire of myself toward

another driver of another Lexus who cannot
see me here, existing, if slowly.

I don’t know how to leave behind the memory
of a man erased by his own brittle irony.

I know how this works. Fathers, founding or
otherwise. I am still too loud. Still too filthy.

This is where I deny America its right to hold me
as a daughter while it crowns its men with muskets.

I can take my nowhere, my nothing, and build it
into a filth that is a weapon and a throne.

Tonight my eyes are burning not from smog
but song. I bark until the landlord comes.

Shove and shove until the doors open wide. This
is where I crack the earth open so you might feel it.

[Image Description: A blue-eyed, fair-skinned woman with freckles and red hair in a high bun wearing winged eyeliner and big black cateye glasses. Depicted from the shoulders up, she is standing in front of a full rack of potted ferns and wearing a black t-shirt and a red and black flannel shirt.]

E. Kristin Anderson

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and her work has been published worldwide in many magazines. She 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, forthcoming). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on twitter at @ek_anderson.