It’s Hard To Dance 

after Florence + The Machine

When I unfold myself into the sun I am restarting
in the only way I know how. This is the game I play—

how deep can I bury fear before it comes back to spin
in my doorway? Regrets slip through fingers like sand

as the days darken and it’s hard to see past my exposed
throat even as scar tissue fades. Tonight I berate the devil

in my kitchen sink, pour soap down the drain, and find
the emergency maintenance number. My heart, too,

is graceless and I shake the dust from it just to make this call.
Every new headache is a gauntlet of possible disease—I line up

the pills, consider the hospital, turn out the light. I shake the fog
from my lips to say goodnight. The devil in me won’t be buried

and it’s fine—I carry a shovel anyway, jump-start my lungs,
hold out a rope for my inner child. This is the romance

of illness—the questions, the keening, the wild revelations
at dawn sobbing and ghoulish. When I hold out my hands

I’m waiting for the empty weight of hope. I tally my futures
on my bedroom wall and fall asleep. In every nightmare

I am destined to return to the town where I grew up over
and over, always in the rain. I barely wake up and the shadows

dance so I open the window and turn up the radio. I peel
my own shadow from the pavement below and swallow it

with coffee. Tomorrow I’ll vomit into the sink and switch on
the garbage disposal, a mournful sound to carry in my joints.

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 and her work has been widely published in magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, We’re Doing Witchcraft, 17 seventeen XVII and Behind, All You’ve Got. Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Porkbelly Press.