Look On The Bright Side
(after Paramore)
For a little bit longer I think I can carry myself like
a can of gasoline: half-empty and red. But today
I’ll stand still and take the weather personally. I’ve seen
the swell of your noise, but I can show you the sound
of teeth tightening around a pillow, the sensation
of safety gone every time I open the door. The rain
coming in from the Gulf splits me open and I swear
if you tell me to smile I will show you what Mercury
in retrograde tastes like. I will show you how anger
is not just a floatation device but the blood in my mouth.
The bright side is this sun, this blazing heat and
as I melt into asphalt it turns out my best intentions
are manifesting not in a bullet journal but in the rotten
piece of tooth that I pulled from my mouth last night,
bloody and real. Today is its own war, a television
under pressure. I cry but leave my glasses on because
I need to see to stay pissed off and I dig the dust
from beneath a barrel of roses, the rot and dry of me.
This is what a lost cause looks like: medical debt,
my crooked mouth, a sedative at dawn when
the sky is turning shades of pink into a mean laugh.
If I keep watching the news I think I’ll choke.
I want to run but I can’t even get in the car. I’ll keep
that tooth on my nightstand until I forget it’s there.
The optimist in me feels for an infection when I remove
my glasses in the night fog. As the barometer shifts
so does every bone in my body. And I can’t close my eyes
without seeing the men with their feet on my shoulders,
their rosy mouths telling me the sky isn’t falling
when I’m already living in a breathless flood of stars,
hot and coughing. War doesn’t always look like jets
and bombs. That’s the joke. That’s the senator hiding
under my bed like the boogey man he is. I pull at what’s
left of my tooth, glass-sharp, this one thing I can touch,
my anger too fleshy and too pink to brandish outside—
you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you it’s real.
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 a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph 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.
Comments