Photo by Jordan Sanchez on Unsplash
Privately, for over a year now you drove off and left me.
The place cooled down beaming and bright—
put my name on a silencer (it’s not the end of the world).
There’s always another dance; will I be a wonderful l time?
Shut the door. Learn about it from television. Be good company.
It’s not my day, so far out. Look at me that way.
Sing it down tonight. I don’t want to talk about it—
like being the worst mistake was sort of sacred,
perhaps one of the fortunate ones on some television special.
No one can make the sound of daughters— it’s the way
we’re trying to talk about promises, so wound up,
way out, exactly like luck. This isn’t a social call.
Sing for us a hundred times before the end of night;
girls don’t have to jabber all the time to be happy, I’m sure.
I’d feel the grin in better hands on days when you take
that damned dream in the house, awfully strange.
You won’t expose the music you forget, something pink—
it’s strange that you have never heard of it Honey, don’t
wander around beautiful. Prepare yourself for a couple of days.
So the dance is off. The shock? It’s the only answer.
Darling, I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t have to be superman.
This is a found poem using speech and quotations from the following sources:
Duncan, Lois. Daughters of Eve. Revised Paperback ed. New York: Little, Brown, 2011. 2-3, 8-10, 13-15. Print.
Duncan, Lois. Don’t Look Behind You. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell for Young Readers, 1990. 13-16, 18-19. Print.
Duncan, Lois. Down a Dark Hall. 2nd ed. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell for Young Readers, 1990. 113-117, 119. Print.
Duncan, Lois. Summer of Fear. 2nd ed. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1990. 76-77, 80-86. Print.
E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Prince fan, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She is the co-editor of Dear Teen Me and her next anthology, Hysteria: Writing the female body, is forthcoming from Sable Books. She is currently working on Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture with Anomalous Press. Kristin is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press), and 17 seventeen, XVII (Grey Book Press). 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. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on twitter at @ek_anderson.
