Visual Poems: Tongue Stabbed – Lygia Pape, 1968
“My skin felt too hot” is a powerfully visceral & transcendently surreal poem by E. Kristin Anderson from our Summer 2017 issue.
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LIKE THE FOX, IT’S MOSTLY RITZY,
sort of brainy—that blood just
rolled dreaming into brutality.
I salivate like the earlier poets
flirting with absurd reason,
the doorway to so cold.
Veins willing, I thinned down,
aristocratic, bewildered
as an instant of sharp home.
Those things always
are monstrous, stung trusted,
ridden, swerving to good emergency.
And then, for some reason:
The rough tongue (like shaking hell)
was blood, as if it should have been
strong, out of the best intensions.
I wanted a flush of dissociation;
my repertoire cake sitting
in the center of my stomach.
This is an erasure poem. Source: King, Stephen. Christine. New York: Signet, 1983. 17-22, Print.
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Based in Austin, TX, E. KRISTIN ANDERSON has been published widely in magazines. She’s also the author of seven chapbooks, including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Fire in the Sky and Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night. Kristin is an editor and designer at Red Paint Hill and was formerly a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker.
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