E. Kristin Anderson

All sorts of witchcraft

She made her own luck,
planned around    the psychic
which art in heaven.

A concussion    is going to be    all we have to go on.
Some sort of magic    all right or not—
there’s always music.

If she could    sit on her ass and cry,
God    could find    some good songs,
some tea, maybe.

She’s in this    picture,    blinking behind those
things she can tell,    willing to believe
traight through the morning.

Start all over:
nobody’s going to expect a girl
so nice she can’t dirty her hands.

In no time    she runs and tells
the river,        thrown in the water,
headed for home.

_____
This is a found poem using speech and quotations from the following sources:

• Duncan, Lois. Killing Mr. Griffin. Revised Paperback ed. New York: Little, Brown, 2010. 150-152, 156, 158, 160. Print.

• Duncan, Lois. Locked in Time. Revised Paperback ed. New York: Little, Brown, 2011. 137-138, 142-145. Print.

• Duncan, Lois. The Third Eye. 2nd ed. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell for Young Readers, 1984. 136-137, 143-144. Print

divider

Dirty linen

For hours I tried calling you.
It seemed natural    two nights ago.
You got to see    fingerprints.    You were standing.

The time may turn.    Take an hour and come with me,
here and alive right now.    I should have
exposed            pure chaos.

I can’t imagine    a madhouse—
keep reminding me    it’s bound to follow you,
like reliving that morning

Just as I fell, I saw you;
I can see why    you never returned.
I wanted to be able to forget.

I’m not going to try that again.
Did you hear?    A ghost    won’t go away;
I didn’t make that happen.

_____
This is a found poem using speech and quotations from the following source:

• Duncan, Lois. The Third Eye. 2nd ed. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell for Young Readers, 1984. 135-139, 141-144. Print.

divider

Enjoy your summer.

This morning they were driving,
didn’t want people around    found each other.

I don’t know what it is with
Prince Charming,    three weeks apart.

Until he gets back,    you’d better
come along,    remember when she was    seventeen.

Quite a way from there    hey only drove down to
imagine where else she would go.

Arrange the return    at a time like this;
I guess she’s seventeen;    too young to be    thinking.

If he could only have    the coast,
give up    so completely,    the wind    criticizing.

_____
This is a found poem using speech and quotations from the following sources:

• Duncan, Lois. Don't Look Behind You. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell for Young Readers, 1990. 5, 7, 9-10. Print.

• Duncan, Lois. I Know What You Did Last Summer. Revised Paperback ed. New York: Little, Brown, 2010. 2-3, 6. Print.

• Duncan, Lois. Summer of Fear. 2nd ed. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1990. 14-19. Print.

 


E. Kristin Anderson is author of eight 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), Acoustic Battery Life (ELJ Publications, 2016), 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, based on the popular website, was published in October of 2012 by Zest Books (distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and her forthcoming anthologies are, Hysteria: Writing the Female Body (Sable Books) and Come As You Are (ELJ). She is currently a poetry editor for Found Poetry Review and is the new Special Projects Manager at ELJ. She has published poetry in many magazines worldwide, including Juked, Nashville Review, Ambit, [PANK], Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cicada and has work forthcoming in American Journal of Nursing and Kindred. She grew up in Maine, lives in Austin, Texas, and blogs at EKristinAnderson.com.