This Summer, All Those Songs

I tried to imagine dancing – how yesterday
my muscles understood sunshine. I tried

to hear the music, the grace in your voice,
the sex and the uncertainty. I laid in blue

sheets, waiting for the elevator. Waiting
to shake the dust from my hair. Trying

to remember how those notes on that guitar
made me shiver. I turned up the AC.

Wiggled my toes. Killed a spider in my kitchen.
I broke my fast with a tuna salad sandwich

and stayed up all night reading poetry,
listening for grace, the voice

on the elevator. Chains wrapped around gears. Stuck.
Dearly beloved, I killed myself in my kitchen, sun blazing

past the window glass. I drank peppermint tea
and imagined dancing. I imagined Coca-Cola

and your voice and laid in blue sheets, writing
a letter. I heard bells, just over the air conditioner.

Bells and a voice and a dance that said, Wait.

E. Kristin Anderson is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author who grew up in Westbrook, Maine and is a graduate of Connecticut College. She has a fancy diploma that says “B.A. in Classics,” which makes her sound smart but has not helped her get any jobs in Ancient Rome. Kristin is the co-editor of Dear Teen Me, an anthology based on the popular website and her YA memoir The Summer of Unraveling is forthcoming in 2017 from ELJ Publications. Her poetry has been published worldwide in many magazines and anthologies and she is the author of four chapbooks: A Jab of Deep Urgency (Finishing Line Press) and A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks) Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (forthcoming from Porkbelly Press), and Acoustic Battery Life (forthcoming from ELJ Publications). She is an online editor at Hunger Mountain and a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker. She now lives in Austin, TX where she is currently working on a full-length collection of erasure poems from women’s and teen magazines. She blogs at EKristinAnderson.com.