By E. Kristin Anderson
(after Stranger Things)
This is how we sleep: one at a time
separated by the pink pillow at our knees not calling
mom or dad or mom not calling anyone
the boyfriend gone from the window camera lens
glittering shattered in the school parking lot
that camera lost and no longer a part of this.
How we sleep: with the lights on and not at all
with warm orange dawn approaching and monsters
in the fuzzy dark nearer than friendships
open and broken— a sensation of loss and memory.
This is how we sleep: in hypnogogic blinks pink
behind the eyelids one theory after another and another
casting itself onto those eyelid theaters not a single thought
of breakfast not a single thought of truth or
perhaps of only truth perhaps the stranger truth
of every back yard of every forest floor of every
clandestine party. This is how we sleep: next to each other
next to this closeness unanticipated door locked,
window locked,
lights on.
E. Kristin Anderson is an author, poet, Prince fan, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast who formerly made magazines with The New Yorker and read submissions for Found Poetry Review. Currently she works with Red Paint Hill and is the editor of the literary anthologies Come As You Are (Anomalous Press) Hysteria (forthcoming, Sable Books)and is the author of eight chapbooks including Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Fire in the Sky, We’re Doing Witchcraft, and 17 seventeen XVII. Kristin grew up in Maine and has a B.A. in Classics from Connecticut College and currently lives in sunny Austin, Texas.